Welcome to the 35th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘jump-and-jive’. The phrase feels like an anachronism. It likely came from 1930s and 1940s African American culture. A portmanteau of ‘jump blues’ music and high-energy ‘jive’ dance style of the era. Jive was also used to describe related slang. All of which was popularised by the likes of Cab Calloway.
This month’s soundtrack is by Dimitri from Paris, recorded at Defected Records. It’s sublime.
While 35, is considered neutral in Chinese culture; there are aspects of it which bear thinking about. Depending how you read it, it can sound similar to ‘life without’ or ‘life not’. All of which seem appropriate when one thinks about the 35-Year-Old Crisis. Employers in China unofficially have 35 as a cut-off age for hiring.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Brands can’t wait for sovereign cloud but have to work with what they have.
The argument over UPF (ultra processed food) is a blunt instrument that ignores the benefits of functional foods, focusing on how things are made, rather than nutrition and what they do.
The need for determination, taste and deciding what matters is as important as AI in advertising planning
Havas research on desirable brands revolving around attraction, attachment and affinity.
Books that I have read
Murder on Mt Fuji by Shizuko Natsuki is the story of the Wada family. A multi-generation family tied to a pharmaceutical business. The family patriarch Yohei Wada is killed and the story unravels the mystery of who really killed him and why. The Japanese title of the book references a play by a 1930s detective story author. The mystery plays out as an Agatha Christie novel with Japanese characteristics.
Things I have been inspired by.
AI transformation progress
Stanford HAI have built an online dashboard to track AI-related transformation through economics. At the moment there is still little evidence for a rapid wave of automation in the macroeconomic data, but its definitely worthwhile keeping an eye on for evidence-based analysis as an antidote to hype and speculation.
Chart of the month.
Going back over the IPA’s research into influencer campaign effectiveness, this chart buried in the report caused me to pause. It implies that there isn’t an effective formula for repeatable influencer marketing success.
Reading around the chart further, the data is artificially skewed by the removal of campaign data for which no RoI was received at all. That would lower the curve further than it is already.
Things I have watched.
I have been enjoying season two of The Agency, Paramount’s adaption the French series The Bureau about modern-day spies and the dangers of emotional attachment. I can highly recommend both of them. The Agency has a really strong cast with Michael Fassbender playing the protagonist, with Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere as supporting characters.
Seeing Richard Gere in the film reminded me to rewatch Red Corner which is a classic murder mystery from 1997, with the plot twist being that it occurs in the go-go era of an opening up China.
Bai Ling appears as his court-appointed lawyer. Parts of it reminded me of the late 1990s media gold rush into China by Rupert Murdoch looking to expand his then booming satellite TV business, but once the murder trial gets under way it stays into the land of fantasy with an American court room drama projected into a Chinese setting. Ling manages to turn out a great performance given the material that she was working with.
Useful tools.
I have been working on a number of qualitative interviews and found MumbleNote an invaluable part of the process. Its key benefit is not having bot join the calls that I have been doing. Instead it works of your Mac’s audio system.
The sales pitch.
I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.
With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives, creative platforms and new business pitches to sports partnerships.
My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.
The Strategic Toolkit:
Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Arm Holdings), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Personal Care, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.
Ok this is the end of this newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the sun when you can.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.
Welcome to the 34th edition of my newsletter. This issue sees me writing this from my parent’s home in the North West of England. It’s also part of the reason why this has been published later than usual.
The change of pace in Granadaland in comparison to London was noteworthy. In bingo lingo 34 would be ‘ask for more’ – which seems to be very much on the zeitgeist at the moment. There is a general zeitgeist of dissatisfaction in the UK,
In Chinese 34, is considered an unlucky number as 4 sounds similar to the word for death and similar in nature to the number 13 in western cultures.
For this edition’s soundtrack, I went back to move forward with a mix by the late great Larry Levan playing at End Max, Tokyo in 1991. By this time the famous DJ had become a long term heroin addict and had complications due to his drug use and HIV; yet you wouldn’t know it from this set, he died the following November.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
An analysis of Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings to try and understand what was happening beneath the big numbers in a febrile time.
From AI shamans, the Ulm School of Design, an AI reckoning and everything in between.
The 2026 World Cup marketing kick-offs and a bunch more things.
ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings tells a far more nuanced story than the top-line numbers.
High end shopping hauls are becoming a cultural phenomenon. Chanel is no longer just behind a velvet rope; but may erode brand equity
Publicis Groupe’s acquisition of LiveRamp and the move to orchestrating enterprise data
How the FT thinks marketing is being shaped by AI from production to consumer behaviour.
I worked on a few sports partnerships activation whilst embedded at Google Cloud and an F1 sports partnership at a freelance engagement more recently. So my attention was immediately grabbed by this collection of research from Ipsos on sports partnerships. It shows the need for long ongoing sports partnerships and the power of a brand sponsor that is highly aligned with the sport and the team.
Nigo at the Design Museum
Nigo is a natural subject for a museum as he has assiduously curated his own life. What particularly impressed me about the Design Museum exhibition was how it made clear that Nigo’s work was a continuation of the earlier work done by the people behind Major Force and File Records: Hiroshi Fujiwara, Takagi Kan, Gota Yashiki and Toshio Nakanishi.
The Major Force crew weren’t just musicians, DJs and producers; but designers and cultural commentators with columns in Japanese magazines.
Even the name Nigo came from people in Tokyo clubs calling Tomoaki Nagao ‘Hiroshi Fujiwara Ni-go’ aka Hiroshi Fujiwara number 2.
When Fujiwara and co. finished their Last Orgy culture column in Takarajima magazine and the spin-off late night TV show, Nigo got their blessing and wrote Last Orgy 2 continuing on in Popeye magazine.
Fujiwara helped fund Nigo’s expansion into retail with the Nowhere boutique, which was the foundation for A Bathing Ape and Jun Takahashi’s Undercover. More on this here, and more on the exhibition at The Design Museum here.
Chart of the month.
Ipsos looked at fans who had differing levels of fandom for a premier league football team and partner brands with different levels of brand fit with the game. Prompted recall was measured over the 2020/21 football season. While the levels changed, there was a clear correlation between the level of brand fit and degree of fandom and prompted brand recall.
Things I have watched.
I watched the rest of the original OSS 117 series of films that I didn’t watch last month. This moved the action to Tokyo and Brazil.
OSS 117 Mission For A Killer
OSS 1167 Mission to Tokyo
OSS 117 Double Agent
Mission For A Killer saw Frederick Stafford take over the role of OSS 117, if you are a classic film you might recognise him from the Alfred Hitchcock film Topaz. Mission to Tokyo was the acme of the series, and a wonderful cinematic capture of the Japanese post-war economic miracle. The final film Double Agent had John Gavin take on the mantle. By which time the franchise felt like a poorer version of Hollywood, Gavin himself was a competent actor, but the creative spark in the franchise was gone. Instead it became part of a sea of sameness in western espionage cinema.
I can understand why there was a major reset, when Michel Hazanavicius rebooted the franchise. He had rich material to work with, from disclosures on what was going on with Jacques Foccart running economic sabotage, deniable military networks and regime change in the Francophone region. Even the private sector were involved, Elf the petroleum giant servicing as a covert slush fund and instrument of foreign policy as France decolonised. The scandal only broke over in the 1990s.
I got to see The Mandalorian and Grogu. It’s a good but flawed film. I got into The Mandalorian, not as a Star Wars devotee, but having a deep appreciation for the spaghetti westerns and the chambara films that it subtly drew from.
The film plugs a gap in the Star Wars franchise in the cinema, so expectations were high for Star Wars fans. What you get is spectacle, an experience that would feel at home in a Disney park. So it’s entertaining. The bad points in my opinion are down to a loose plot points, having an actress of the quality of Sigourney Weaver and not using her properly.
What put salt in the wound was the trouble put into scenes that pay clumsy homage to Ray Harryhausen and Francis Ford Coppola respectively. Putting the same effort with less money into tightening up the script would have paid dividends. Maybe Disney didn’t care so long as the space was filled.
I guess the moral of the story is don’t watch this film with a cinephile.
Useful tools.
I have been a big fan of Parcel for a while, but didn’t realise until I listened to a John Gruber podcast episode that it now allows you to track Amazon deliveries as well. Given that I work from home a lot having this app makes like a lot easier to manage package deliveries.
The sales pitch.
I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.
With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives, creative platforms and new business pitches to sports partnerships.
My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.
The Strategic Toolkit:
Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Arm Holdings), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Personal Care, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.
Ok this is the end of this newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the sun when you can, don’t linger on the next long weekend being at the end of August.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.
AI reckoning as a term is a rather stark warning. Even more so when it comes from Aswath Damodaran who is a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at NYU (New York University).
The reckoning that Damodaran is concerned about is a ‘Minsky moment‘ and represents a stark contrast to the boundless techno-optimism of Marc Andreessen.
The AI reckoning wasn’t on the mind of investors who bought into Cerebras Systems.
Cerebras Systems makes wafer sized chips with memory and processing on the same die. This reduces latency and increases speed. As cool as Cerebras Systems technology is, the company currently has sales of $510 million and was valued on its opening day of trading at $71 billion.
AI-Powered Cyberattacks | Robert Scoble and A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify.. The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.” All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.
Disclosure: this analysis of Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings does not constitute financial advice. It is not a recommendation to buy or sell Omnicom or any other company mentioned in the post. Instead it’s about trying to understand the dynamics underpinning one of the largest actors in brand marketing.
The headlines surrounding Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings, shows a growth in top-line earnings of 69.2% to hit $6.242 billion. That topline number looks like market dominance following Omnicom’s $13.5 billion all-stock acquisition of IPG.
Core operations performance
There is more nuance in the details. I looked at the ‘core operations’ metric to look for signs of momentum. The core operations reporting framework is designed to reflect Omnicom’s, ongoing business by excluding the financial results of businesses that are already disposed of, or, are classified as held for sale on the balance sheet.
This grew by 6.7% according to Omnicom’s Q1 investor presentation. But 2.7% of that number was due to the decline in value of the US dollar. Omnicom’s actual underlying organic growth sits at 3.9%. This number matters, it peels away the acquired revenue to answer is the core business actually winning more money from Omnicom clients?
Relative performance
When you benchmark that 3.9% against their direct competitors, Omnicom sits awkwardly in the middle of a two-tier market.
Publicis Groupe, who posted robust 6.4% organic growth. Publicis is leading the market because they put in structural plumbing years ago. They acquired Epsilon and Sapient early, built a high-margin moat around first-party data and digital business transformation. They sell complex orchestration that CMOs are currently buying.
Stagwell is operating without legacy creative baggage; winning frustrated global clients who want digital-first performance.
Havas continues to lean into its ‘Village’ model. By forcing physical and cultural integration under one roof, they appeal directly to clients who dont want to manage fragmented multi-agency relationships and budgets; even if Havas currently lacks the algorithmic gravity of a Publicis.
WPP posted a net organic revenue decline of 6.7%. WPP has structural issues in its portfolio of agencies that is currently being addressed with the Elevate 28 plan, persistent client losses, and is overexposed to a stagnating technology sector client base.
Direction change
The nature of Omnicom’s revenue is shifting in a way that distorts its apparent size. The holding company is aggressively pivoting toward “principal media buying,” a model where they purchase advertising inventory in bulk, assume the financial risk, and resell it to clients with an undisclosed markup.
Omnicom aggressively sunset historic brands like DDB and FCB to hit a massive $1.5 billion synergy target, they prioritised financial speed over operational stability.
Clients do not buy holding company P&L synergies; they buy specific team chemistry, cultural nuance, and dedicated attention.
Mashing competing agencies together in highly competitive, over-brokered markets like London, Omnicom triggered client flight. Back before the Interpublic deal, some estimates 60% of Interpublic and Omnicom scopes of work were allegedly already understaffed.
Omnicom chose to shrink to grow, but in doing so, they actively risked alienating the CMOs needed to fund Omnicom’s pivot into integrated media.
Accounts well told
This approach transforms Omnicom from an hourly fee-for-service agency into a media arbitrage focused business. Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings relies heavily on gross revenue reporting, which includes massive pass-through media costs, their top-line figures look artificially ‘explosive’ compared to it’s competitors who report on a net revenue basis.
On a reported GAAP basis, Omnicom’s operating margin dropped to 10.4%, crushed under the weight of $59.4 million in IPG integration costs and $34.3 million in losses from the disposal of non-core assets. Omnicom are relying on adjusted, Non-GAAP EBITA metrics, which ignore the friction of the merger, to show a margin expansion to 14.8%.
A second distortion is the narrative around the agencies to be sold, on the analyst call John Wren estimated that the agencies being sold had a margin of less than 10%. Which could led those not paying attention to assume that the core businesses would be more profitable; but that may not be the case, despite Omnicom’s leadership’s intention to permanently elevate it’s margin profile.
Opaque picture
There seemed to be an uneven performance across geographic territories and business units. At the time of the IPG deal, health was considered to be one of the biggest opportunities, yet, seemed to have a low single-digit organic growth trajectory, outperformed by PR and experiential agencies.
Omnicom’s gross long-term debt had expanded to $9.977 billion, up from historical norms, as it absorbed IPG’s existing debt load, $1.7 billion in new U.S. dollar notes alongside €600 million in Euro notes to refinance operations and ensure liquidity.
Every source used in the post can be found in the more information section below.
I am not a football fan, but I recognise the power that the 2026 World Cup has to move hearts and minds. This year it’s being hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States. The 2026 World Cup fan experience is shrouded in uncertainty.
I found it interesting that both adidas with the launch of its match ball and Panini with the launch of its sticker book both marked the start of the countdown to the 2026 World Cup season.
Chinese countryside’s quieter strains – by Yuxuan JIA – Decades of son preference have left villages full of unmarried men, driving bride prices higher and sustaining a shadow market for “Vietnamese brides” that can slide into fraud, coercion, and trafficking. Young people, especially young women, are drifting away from rural patriarchy and the obligation-heavy world of kinship and “face”, while the influencer economy and short-video apps offer fantasies of easy money to teenagers with weak school prospects.
Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men | Washington Post – “I don’t want to be too disparaging about them because they’re our Christian brothers and sisters, but worshiping in a big former supermarket with dry ice machines and a pop band, it’s not really traditional Christianity,” Father Longenecker said. His new parishioners are attracted to “very traditional worship with lots of incense and altar boys and sacred music in the traditional style.”
More NatSec | Big Lychee, Various Sectors – From the government’s press release… Safeguarding national security is a continuous endeavour with no end point. At its core this sounds like the Stalin derived Maoist principle of struggle. National security ‘enemies’ like Jimmy Lai, Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho serve the same purpose as George Orwell’s character Emmanuel Goldstein in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ever-tightening system is allegedly concerned with leaderless lone wolves, small cells and external actors – but the reality is just control in Orwell’s novel.
Revising Hong Kong’s Past – Lingua Sinica – Among the changes noted was a complete erasure of references to the Tiananmen Massacre, which was recast as “political turmoil in the late spring and early summer of 1989.” Gone from the exhibit entirely, the Ming Pao reported, is a previous image that showed one million Hong Kongers taking to the streets in 1989 in support of the demonstrators in China.
I am skeptical about ‘gurus’. However, I found this Tony Robbins video good for getting out of a period of ‘stuckness’ in my thinking. Robbin’s ideas about priming, in particular they way he links physical activity to mental exercises works and has a good deal of neuroscience behind it.
Japan loses its thirst for vending machines | FT – Tens of thousands of vending machines are vanishing from Japan, as machines that once symbolised the nation’s love of innovation are shunned in a climate of rising inflation and deepening labour shortages.
The nation’s stock of 2.2mn drinks vending machines is down 23 per cent from its bubble-era peak in 1985, according to the Japan Vending System Manufacturers Association.
The faltering economics of running a national vending machine empire were exposed when DyDo, Japan’s third biggest operator, this month said it would scrap almost 7.5 per cent of its network of 270,000 units after posting its largest ever annual loss. – what surprised me was that the vending machines weren’t digitised.
Why do men love Stone Island | FT – “Football in the late 1980s and 1990s was a heavily policed environment under surveillance, where visibility carried risk,” says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. “On the terraces, clothing wasn’t decoration, it was risk management. Stone Island mattered because its garments were already structured around concealment, modulation and elective visibility. The detachable badge, reversible constructions, modular hoods and certain fabric treatments enabled wearers to calibrate how legible they were, depending on context. Football casuals were not simply performing taste; they were managing recognition.”
Apple rolls out UK age checks for iPhone users | FT – interesting move, I did notice that it assumed my account was adult due to the length it had been held. It reminded me of friends who registered email addresses, domain names and even social media handles for their newly born children – and did just enough to keep the accounts alive.
The 49MB Web Page | thatshubham – Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user’s cross-site identity together across different ad networks.
When you open a website on your phone, it’s like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.
Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe’s IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.
So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background
The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.
Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.
A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….
Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify… The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.”
All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.
OpenAI acquires popular tech talk show for ‘low hundreds of millions’ | FT – ChatGPT-maker moves into broadcasting with deal for TBPN after it had pledged to abandon ‘side-quests’ – I think that this is trying to balance the narrative with Anthropic which is ripping ahead. In past decades you would have dumped a lot of money into a campaign run by a PR agency, but time moves on
New Internet of Things Plan Targets Global Infrastructure – Jamestown – A new action plan for the Internet of Things (IoT) increases the possibility that Chinese-built connected infrastructure in the United States could become a platform for data access, cyber pre-positioning, and attacks on U.S. cyber-physical systems in a prolonged crisis or confrontation. The plan, launched jointly by nine ministries, defines IoT as a total cyber-physical environment that links “people, machines, and things” across sensing, networks, platforms, applications, and security, and sets targets for 10 billion terminal connections, more than 50 standards, and deployment across production, consumption, and governance. The plan indicates Beijing is moving from connected devices to connected backbone systems. It reinforces the new Five-Year Plan, suggesting that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to supply not only endpoints like sensors, appliances, and vehicles but also the next generation of AI, computing, and space-ground communications infrastructure that will underpin them.
