Intellectual property legislation has been in the news for the past few weeks as years of lobbying by industry bodies like the RIAA, MPAA and the IFPI have hit a consumer road block. In the UK, the Digital Economy Act which was largely due to the work of the lobbying team at the BPI squeezed in as a dying gasp of Gordon Brown’s Labour administration. This legislation has been in rallied around by the Conservative faction of the current government whilst ignoring consumer rights and many of the digital businesses that it thinks will help to lead the country out of recession.
At a European level, consumers were rallied to the issue of intellectual property by the widespread publicity given to the US SOPA and Protect IP bills that were going through the US parliamentary process. This acted as an entreé for the main course ACTA; which many countries signed up to by surreptitious process to run an end game around likely technology sector counter-lobbying. What this did instead was bring about a militant consumer and political reaction to the agreement which is likely to scupper it.
This has tapped into an anti-American sentiment where intellectual property looks like trade protectionism rather than legitimate concerns; and an anti-media industry sentiment driven by a number of elements:
The inability of businesses to adapt to consumers changing needs for consuming content and the long tail
A long-held feeling that consumers are getting gouged in terms of how much they pay for content
A perception that these companies are dishonest in their dealings with their artists – Kenny Rogers is currently suing EMI, Cheap Trick and the Allman Brothers have filed against Sony Music, Rick James and Chuck D have taken action against Universal, and Sister Sledge are taking action against Warner Music. This is further exasperated by labels enthusiasm for streaming isn’t matched by artists
Frustration and regional restrictions on content and predatory pricing – which becomes more transparent when you look at different Amazon sites and media news websites around the world
The media industry has increasingly tried to have a free ride by passing on costs and responsibility for enforcement to the online property owners like Google and other companies. A less talked about recent development was that the European Court of Justice found against Belgian music royalties collection society SABAM in a case it took against Netlog. It found that courts forcing social networks to monitor for illegal file sharing would strike the wrong balance between the rights of consumers, service providers and content owners.
Looking around the brute force lobbying tactics of the media industry aren’t working; they need to come up with a better, more attractive idea to consumers. One of the key problems in achieving this is they need to have the technology sector on board to make that happen so fence building is required. Media companies also need to get their house in order in terms of being seen to be fair with consumers and artists which requires extensive business re-engineering and a ‘mucking out’ of established management practices – these changes will then take a while to be communicated and believed by consumers.
Finally, the countries that have acted as key drivers around intellectual property rights need to look carefully at how they can achieve reputational damage reduction in Europe.
There is a lot of work to be done before a fair and adult approach can be taken to resolving intellectual property rights in the digital age.
Archived from the blog that I used to write for PR Week. More media related content can be found here.
The Age of Spiritual Machines was written by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a technological rock star, responsible for great music synthesisers and much of the developments around optical character recognition and speech recognition. This is what makes him a good futurist. The fact that he has had his hands dirty.
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is a book of two parts. In the first part, Kurzweil outlines how technology has progressed since the dawn of computing with Charles Babbage’ difference engine. Kurzweil uses this trip down computer memory lane to demonstrated that computing power has been increasing exponentially since the dawn of time rather than just the dawn of Intel with Moore’s Law on the doubling of transistors. Even though silicon transistors may top out computing power will keep on trucking (though Kurzweil doesn’t necessarily have the answer of what is the next technology).
The second part of the book is likely future scenarios; and this is where things get interesting. Kurzweil is setting himself up for a possible fail.
Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold missed the internet in the first edition of The Road Ahead when it was first published in 1995 and Kurzweil sets himself up for a potentially bigger fall in the scope of his book. Even if Kurzweil has his timing a bit wrong or doesn’t get everything right his book is still a great thought experiment in how intelligent computers would impact humanity. More book reviews here.
May 2025 introduction – two little ducks (22) edition
Welcome to my May 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 22nd issue. 22 is known in bingo halls and the Spanish national lottery as two little ducks.
In France, 22 is the equivalent of 5-0 in the English speaking world as slang for the police. 22 is an important number for people who believe in numerology. In Hong Kong, 22 is associated with good fortune. This is down to the number sounding similar to ‘easy’ or ‘bright’ in Cantonese.
I hope that you are tricked into thinking I am bright based this newsletter, so let’s jump in. Inspired by catching up with my old DJing partner Griff, this month I enjoyed the unashamedly joyous pumped-up sounds of Blackpool’s AZYR at the Boiler Room x TeleTech Festival in 2023. In particular the transition at the end of the set between Frankyeffe – Save me and Infectious! – I need your lovin’. (Extra trainspotter points if you knew that Infectious! is a homage / remake of N.R.G’s The Real Hardcore from a year earlier). Wear your headphones, it might be divisive playing the set out loud in the office. More bangers from AZYR here.
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.
Predicting market share through share of search volume and what the rise of AI likely means.
Reaching a precipice in hydrogen power and trends in Chinese skincare amongst other things.
Books that I have read.
Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams. Williams account of her time in Facebook had become the most discussed book of the spring in my social circle. I wrote a long review of it here.
The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge examines the profound cultural impact of generative AI, which is currently experiencing a surge in both its cultural influence and practical applications. Drawing parallels to the internet’s transformative impact in the mid-to-late 1990s, where it permeated various aspects of society and fostered rapid adoption, Wooldridge traces the evolution of generative AI as a phenomenon that emerged gradually over the past half-century. Throughout the book, Wooldridge provides a comprehensive historical overview of AI, including the periods of research stagnation known as AI winters. This historical perspective equips readers with a nuanced understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of AI, enabling them to approach AI adoption with a well-informed perspective.
As I finish this newsletter during the bank holiday weekend, my light reading is Rogue Asset by Andy McDermott. McDermott comes from a long line of British authors like Jack Higgins, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth and Mick Herron who provide novels aimed at a shrinking pool of readers – men. At least, if oneis tobelieve what’s said in the media. Rogue Asset hinges on the premise that the UK has a unit which assassinates the countries enemies on a regular basis. Think somewhere between The Troubles era Det and the modern deep state trope. Our hero is snared into the plot by being discovered on the run thanks to his online behaviour – which is attributed to GCHQ; (but isn’t as mysterious as it sounds because of the programmatic advertising technology stack). So far so good for what it is. I will let know if it goes downhill as a read next month.
Things I have been inspired by.
Mmrytok
Limitations are often the mother of invention. That seems to be the theory behind mmrytok. Mmrytok allows you to do one post a day. It doesn’t support HTML formatting, it doesn’t allow you to link out and doesn’t have a newsfeed. So it’s easy-to-use because it’s less sophisticated than Geocities was. In this respect it is to social media and blogs what Punkt is to smartphones. In an always-on social time, I have found it liberating to use. You can see my page here. I heard of Mmrytok thanks to Matt Muir’s great newsletter Web Curios.
No, AI isn’t making you dumber
Australian documentary maker ColdFusion put together an interesting video essay on How AI is making you dumber.
Yes, you could argue that under certain attributes the population isn’t as smart as they have been in the past. Just last month I shared an article by John Burn-Murdoch. In the article he shared data of a longitudinal trend across countries and age-groups struggling with concentration, declining verbal and numerical reasoning. The problem with Burn-Murdoch’s article vis-a-vis the ColdFusion video is the timeline.
His article charts a decline further back than the rise of generative AI services. Mia Levitin in an essay for the FT attributed the decline in reading to the quick dopamine hits of social media content.
A college professor interviewed by The Atlantic put the decline in reading amongst his undergraduate students put it down to a practice in secondary education of atomising content. Pupils in high schools were assigned excerpts, poetry and news articles to read, but not complete books. This has impacted the size of vocabulary and grasp of language that students starting university now have.
This isn’t new territory, James Gleick in his book Fasterdocumented the massive acceleration of information through the late 20th century and its effects on the general public. The underlying accelerant was described by Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants as the technium – a continuous forward progress due to a massively interconnected system of technology.
There were concerns in research as far back as the late 1980s that television could be adversely affecting children’s reading comprehension and attention spans.
TL;DR – with generative AI you could become dumber, if you use it unwisely – but the problem lies with all of us and what we chose to do with our personal agency.
CIA advertise for Chinese spies
The CIA commissioned a couple of high production value adverts that they’ve been running on social media channels. The adverts are designed to encourage Chinese government employees to come forward as an agent. The sales pitch is about taking control.
A translation of the Chinese tagline: ‘The reason for choosing cooperation: to become the master of (one’s own) destiny‘. More details from the FT about the campaign here, and here’s the twoexecutions currently running on YouTube.
It remains to be seen if the campaign will be effective. The Chinese Ministry of State Security managed to roll-up the CIA’s spy network back in 2010-2012. Up to 30 informants in China were executed.
Montirex
Merseyside sports-inspired lifestyle brand Montirex have published a film telling the brand story from its origins to the present day. The brand is expanding beyond its Merseyside roots to get national and international sales.
Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence
A 2025 global study covering some 48 countries was conducted by KPMG in association with the University of Melbourne. Some key insights from the report. Consumer generative AI is being used instead of enterprise options by workers. Generative AI adopters still have self-perceived low AI skills but that doesn’t slow their adoption. There is higher adoption and trust rates in emerging markets than in developed markets.
Year-on-year we are seeing an increase in both distrust and trust for specific AI use cases, indicating that it is becoming a polarising subject. The lowest trust levels is in tech-savvy Finland. More here.
Chart of the month.
McDonald’s Restaurants saw a decline in sales. This was down to low income consumers spending less, while middle class earners still weren’t going into McDonalds. Normally when there is a recession, McDonalds should benefit from the more well-off trading down to McDonalds. Instead, fortunes have diverged into a ‘k-shaped’ recession. Lower income earners are hit, while middle classes aren’t. What Axios called the ‘McRecession‘.
Things I have watched.
Tony Arzenta (also known as Big Guns). The film is an early 1970s gallo film. French star Alain Delon appears in this classic retribution story based in Milan. As Tony Arzenta, Delon exacts revenge on the former bosses who killed his family by accident in a botched assassination attempt to prevent him from retiring.The film uses a wintry Milan as a good atmospheric backdrop for the action that plays out in a series of shoot-outs and car chases. It’s John Wick before it was even conceived. Delon brings a tension that other stars of the era like Charles Bronson failed to do in similar roles. As Arzenta’s targets flee across Europe, he goes through Germany and Denmark to catch up with them.
Sansho the Bailiff– as a film Sansho the Bailiff comes encumbered with a weight of praise. It is highly rated by film critics and Martin Scorsese had it as one of his must-watch films for young film makers. Director Kenji Mizoguchi assembled an ensemble cast of Japanese actors to tell a story of family hardship and poverty. Kazuo Miyagawa is key to the the production, providing a signature look to the cinematography. There is a tension between the emotional rollercoaster of the story and the reflective nature of the scenes portrayed – I don’t want to say too more, except that even the character actors like Kikue Môri (who plays a pivotal role in the plot as a priestess) are amazing in the film.
Warfare – I was a bit leery of watching Alex Garland’s Warfare after watching Civil War which was strong on aesthetics and emotion, but weak in terms of the creative conceits involved in making the story work. Warfare is the collective accounts of a US military unit during a two-hour fire fight. The story is told from multiple perspectives in real-time. The film captures the stress and boredom of inaction as well as what you would normally expect from this kind of film.
Useful tools.
Reddit Answers
Reddit Answers – alternative to Gigabrain that I recommended back in March. Like Gigabrain, Reddit Answers looks like the kind of knowledge search product that we failed to build at Yahoo! twenty years ago (or NORA as Microsoft has been calling the concept for the past few years). Reddit Answers is powered by Google Vertex AI.
Process online data like its peak web 2.0 all over again
While WordPress installations come with RSS enabled as standard and is something that can then be disabled, many types of sites aren’t RSS enabled. And where they are the web devs will often disable it just because. RSS app will create an RSS feed for websites that don’t have it. This allows you to pull it into data processing using something like Pipes. RSS app starts at $9.99 per month and goes up to $99.99 a month. Pipes starts at free and goes up to $79 per month.
The sales pitch.
I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements in Q4 (October) – keep me in mind; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my May 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and I hope you enjoyed the last bank holiday until August.
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.
Careless People has been a much-discussed book in the circles that I am involved in. In the book, Wynn Williams outlines her career at Facebook / Meta in what was at the time a nascent public policy team. The term careless people is a highly appropriate reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
While I was reading Careless People, The Great Gatsby was having a moment. It was the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby’s publication, and the ‘careless people’ quote was considered apropos for the times we are living in, in particular the Trump administration’s actions.
“They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Anyway, back to Careless People, Wynn Williams outlines her experience from pitching to Facebook for a role that didn’t exist but was needed, through to navigating the global growth Facebook was undertaking at the time. The challenges that Wynn Williams faces can be broadly broken down into four areas (with specific allegations):
Poor management judgement (lying to Congress and providing assistance to authoritarian regimes)
What’s interesting about the book depends on the reader. Much of the experience was relatable to my own earlier experience at Yahoo! The long days, changing priorities, travel (which was much more of a thing pre-COVID), office politics and fiefdoms, the constant unintended consequences of inventing the future. Secondly, the Facebook management have bought into what Barbrook and Cameron termed The Californian Ideology in their 1995 essay of the same name.
“…the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.”
However, I feel fortunate to have worked with a mature leadership who knew what they didn’t know and realised that they lived in a global village. But that might be down to the fact that Yahoo! by the time I had got there had a fair share of ups and downs.
Careless People reminded me a lot of Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, written by Jennifer Edstrom and Martin Eller. Although they are separated by some 25 years between each being written. Both books tell the story of an imperfect organisation scaling to an opportunity— I have written about Barbarians here. Wynn Williams is the better storyteller, providing a coherent and engaging path through the narrative.
I can recommend Careless People as a good book to read, I finished it off over a bank holiday weekend whilst nursing a sprained ankle. For people in advertising and marketing it won’t be that surprising, it confirms many things that were ‘common knowledge’ in the industry. For the general public, it will be shocking given the facts that the author marshals together.
Would I have thought reading Accidental Empires or Barbarians Led by Bill Gates in the late 1990s that Bill Gates would have transformed from the soulless ‘borg leader’ portrayed to the voice of relative reason he is today? Probably not, there might be hope for Zuckerberg at least out of the cast of characters in the book.
Wynn Williams is now exploring the edges of policy and artificial intelligence and is likely someone worth keeping an eye on.
Les Binet did some sterling work thinking about share of search volume as part of his ongoing work looking at marketing effectiveness.
In order to understand share of search volume, we have to go back to 1990 when former advertising veteran and professor John Philip Jones[i] published a paper in the Harvard Business Review[ii] and a subsequent book[iii].
Jones’ research around the linkage between advertising and sales by looking at advertising including tools of his invention STAS (short term advertising strength)[iv] and AIC (advertising intensiveness curve). One of Jones’ key findings was the linkage between a brand’s share of voice and its market share. One of the biggest predictors of brand growth was ESoV (excess share of voice). ESoV is when a brand has a share of voice in excess of the proportion needed to maintain its market share.
During economic good times this might be down to an increase in brand building marketing spend, not only advertising and public relations, but also influencer and sports sponsorships with variable[v] results.
During recessionary times[vi], it might be maintaining brand building marketing spend when the competitors are cutting back.
Part of this brand building work overlaps with increasing marketing penetration through increasing the number of places where the brand is available. During the 95 percent of time that you are not in a buying mindset when you pass a product display in a supermarket it’s a billboard – doing the brand building work.
Jones’ findings were later validated by Peter Field and Les Binet’s work on marketing efficiency[vii], and in the summation of research[viii] from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science by Byron Sharp.
Share of search volume
The clever thing that Les Binet[ix] did with share of search volume[x] was find it as a predictor on the likely time when ESoV was likely to impact with a growth in market share AND, he found that the share of search volume change mapped neatly on to market share change.
The challenge is that different sectors have different times between a change in share of search volume and the corresponding change in market share[xi].
“For mobile phone handsets, Binet further ventured, share of search leads market share “by about six months” as a performance indicator – offering marketers a chance to adapt their strategies if needed if a decline is expected.
“If the brand … had access to the share of search data at the time, it would have had a six-month warning that share of market was about to turn around,” Binet said. “That’s an incredibly useful metric.”
Share of search’s predictive quality for energy brands, Binet explained, was noticeably shorter, at just “nought to three months.”
For automakers, by contrast, share of search anticipates market share by “nine to 12 months,” he said – a significant timeframe for marketers to potentially refine strategies.
Breaking out data for Volkswagen, the auto marque, provided corroboration that sales forecasts based on share of search “are incredibly close to what actually happened,” Binet said.”
Search considerations
Much earlier in my career I worked on the Yahoo! Search business, back when the company had its own search technology and sold its own search advertising. One of the things that we found was that while overall search volume could be modelled accurately for the year based just on January’s search data – unexplained search volume peaks still needed to be ironed out by looking at rolling three-month values instead.
I found it interesting that Binet’s findings didn’t seem the same degree of ‘peakiness’ and was a much more valuable predictor once the time lag factor between share of search volume and market effects were known.
Share of search makes sense from a logical perspective. Many below-the-line activities have been focused on search in terms of aiding SEO to increase share of market opportunity, rather than an explicit appreciation of the impact on the share of search volume and consequently change in market share. My friend James Warren used to talk about public relations and related earned media activities such as organic social media as ‘offline SEO’. This thinking was incorporated into Interpublic’s ‘inline’ concept[xii].
Future search
Share of search volume is complicated by a number of factors that are down to changing consumer behaviour.
Google’s focus on mobile upended the precision that we could search with and what we could search for, out went Boolean operators that could track down a highly relevant web page from 12 years ago. But we could now find the nearest coffee shop with wi-fi. YouTube[xiii] due to its explanatory content became the second largest search engine globally (excluding China).
A good deal of product search has migrated to sites like eBay, Walmart[xiv] and Amazon[xv]. Part of the reason being is that their site search is good enough, they have a wide range of stock and speedy delivery. Amazon also benefits from Amazon Prime which drives customer purchase, but isn’t without controversy[xvi].
Social and generative AI have unlocked new challengers to Google. Search on social platforms has become the go-to approach for many young people. Google acknowledged this when asked by Business Insider[xvii].
“we face robust competition from an array of sources, including general and specialized search engines, as well as dedicated apps.”
The move to social is about tapping what we called back in my Yahoo! days ‘knowledge search’[xviii]. Search startups like Gigabrain have tried to tap into this market by providing a better search function of Reddit forums.
Finally, the move towards consumer usage of generative AI tools based on large language models has created new competitors to Google including Perplexity and ChatGPT Search. Google itself has adopted LLMs in its own search offering and seen an increase in both revenue and profit from search advertising[xix].
Share of model vs. share of search volume
In order to try and understand new LLM-driven search, innovator agencies like Jellyfish and Deft[xx] have looked towards understanding share of model. Share of model tries to understand how LLMs perceive a given brand, in a similar way to the way SEO rankings held a similar place in search engine marketing. Like SEO, they look to understand whether the brand has sufficient optimisation of their digital properties to feature in recommendations by the models.
What share of model doesn’t give us is the consumer insight provided by share of search volume. Share of search volume is consumer behaviour driven and advertising influenced; share of model is algorithmic behaviour driven and training influenced.
