Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia was interviewed by Axios. In the wide ranging interview he is advocating for open LLM models. He thinks that the benefits of closed models ties in with the benefits of scale and convenience from cloud computing infrastructure. Jensen Huang also talks about sovereign AI at an enterprise level as well as country level.
What struck me was Huang’s strong advocacy for open source and open models. He points to the central role that Linux plays today. (Android is Linux as is Google Chrome, macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS all run on Darwin which is open source and relies on BSD and the Mach micro-kernel – which are also open source). He points out that open source allows inspection, customisation to harden the software and ultimately be trusted.
It one of the best interviews that I have seen where Jensen Huang is at his most articulate. It’s also interesting that the interview is so wide ranging. Huang’s last point about now being the most important time, gave me a moment for pause. Huang’s time is mediated by his staff rather than by outlook or his watch. But it also made me wonder about the nature of strategy and horizon-scanning at Nvidia.
The interview was published at a time when the media realised that Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 as an open model was competitive with US frontier models on many measures.
Contrast Huang’s viewpoint with Palantir CEO Alex Karp on CNBC. Karp discussed a growing unhappiness amongst US enterprises about the cost of accessing models from large AI companies, yet receiving ‘no value’ from the technology.
Surfing the wave
Kind of a tangential point to to Huang’s the most important time is now is about timing in technological innovation. Robert X Cringely in his book Accidental Empires made this point through the use of surfing as an analogy. If you hit a wave too early, you wipe out, if you hit the wave too late the momentum and energy has gone out of the wave. Hitting it at the right time the most important factor. It’s a timeless truth.
Film maker David Hoffman documented behind the scenes at General Magic as part of the process to make a launch video for their product. General Magic were too early to the wave as this behind the scenes footage shows.
Ladders
I like Justin Taylor’s videos because of their insightful content delivered in a snarky slacker way. In this video he uses ladders to illustrate the importance of supply chains and logistics to support US air power. Which explains why the US is restricted to predictable bases in the current Iranian conflict amongst other things.
Writing about consumer grievance came from a couple of things. I was watching a lecture by professor Robert Reich at Stanford and it reminded me of Edelman‘s 2025 Trust Barometer report ‘Trust and the Crisis of Grievance‘.
Edelman’s annual report is a barometer, a global snapshot of who and what consumers trust. As long as I can remember Edelman’s report into trust of institutions has been in decline, but the 2025 report highlighting consumer grievance marked a perceived acceleration.
TL;DR
Why it matters: Most brands treat consumer complaints as a customer service headache to be managed by a chatbot. That is a massive commercial misstep. Grievance is not an admin burden; it is a raw, unvarnished map of what your audience actually cares about.
What is changing: We are seeing the rise of a distinct global grievance culture. When trust in traditional institutions wobbles, consumers direct their frustration at the brands they buy from. If you look closely at these grievances, you see the exact gaps where your business is failing to deliver on its promise.
The big picture: Two distinct trust economies now exist. There is the formal, corporate version presented in annual reports, and the real-world version lived by your customers. When the gap between the two grows too wide, the goodwill sitting on your balance sheet evaporates.
Global grievance
In the report Edelman posited that trust in institutions was no longer a universally shared civic resource. Around the world, it had become a luxury commodity that is heavily segmented by income and social class.
Putting my cards on the table
You the reader should question my interpretation as an enquiring mind. With that in mind, it makes sense to understand my starting viewpoint as I started to go through the subject matter. I agreed with the essence that Edelman’s research has captured. And the bifurcation of the economy is being baked into marketing plans that I have worked on over the past few years.
I have my doubts about their methods. I believe that their motives are good admittedly moderated by commercial considerations, but I did find myself questioning the techniques used and data transparency.
I set out to find high quality research that validated, or challenged the concept of consumer grievance.
Edelman’s original approach was triggered by the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’. The survey’s structural model was built upon the mid-1990s theories of Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama argued that institutional trust was primarily driven by upward mobility, structured legal systems, and guaranteed economic prosperity.
The Trust Barometer’s original respondents was restricted to “opinion leaders” or “opinion elites”. That mean’t highly affluent college-educated people aged 35 to 64 with high media consumption and active engagement in public policy. The demographic that prospective Edelman clients would sit neatly within.
Technological and economic change saw Edelman move to a general population sample. They also moved from telephone interviews to online surveys. The number of respondents increased from 1,300 in five countries to 36,000 respondents.
2020 saw a change in survey design that broke the idea of ‘to do what is right’ into two attributes:
Competence
Ethical behaviour
Business did well on competency but less well in ethical considerations. Government, media and NGOs were viewed as lacking in both . Edelman compensated for this by studying proximal trust and employee trust.
Edelman introduced the concept of ‘trust brokering’ – an organisations capacity to support dialogue and bridge social divides.
The Genesis of Global Grievance
With a flair for drama and storytelling Edelman’s Trust Barometer links the decline of trust and the genesis of consumer grievance back to the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’ protests against the World Trade Organisation ministerial conference held in the city. While a wide coalition of both left and right political figures, NGOs, organised labour were there to protest against unfettered globalisation the wheels were already in motion.
…globalization is not new, but that the present era of globalization, driven by competitive global markets, is outpacing the governance of markets and the repercussions on people. Characterized by “shrinking space, shrinking time and disappearing borders”, globalization has swung open the door to opportunities.
Breakthroughs in communications technologies and biotechnology, if directed for the needs of people, can bring advances for all of humankind. But markets can go too far and squeeze the non-market activities so vital for human development. Fiscal squeezes are constraining the provision of social services. A time squeeze is reducing the supply and quality of caring labour. And an incentive squeeze is harming the environment. Globalization is also increasing human insecurity as the spread of global crime, disease and financial volatility outpaces actions to tackle them.
The above quote came from the introduction to the 1999 Human Development Report (HDR) by the United Nationals Development Programme (UNDP).
As the 1999 HDR introduction alludes, by 1999 globalisation was not new and was already happening from Japanese consumer electronics to Korean shipbuilding. Instead globalisation was moving at a pace that institutions were no longer able to keep up with it or control it.
This viewpoint is supported by Professor Reich’s lecture on the factors driving the rise voter interest in populist leaders like President Trump. Reich outlines a four decades-long trajectory marked by:
The decoupling of productivity from wages. The US Board of Labour & Statistics paper Understanding of the labor productivity and compensation gap, considers the gap to have opened up in the 1970s. The fissure since the 1970s was also documented by the Economic Policy Institute’s work The Productivity-Pay Gap. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published research showed how corporate profits decoupled from employee compensation from the early 2000s on.
The Reagan era erosion of labour bargaining power. Similar erosion also took place in the UK under the Thatcher government.
The concentration of corporate market power. Deregulation from the 1980s on, allowed the financial and corporate sectors to become politically and economically dominant. Reich argued that this created a system average citizens perceived as rigged to favour corporations and big banks over ordinary workers. The 2008 bank bailout while ordinary citizens faced foreclosures cemented this perception. This isn’t only a western issue. 44% of China’s workforce now work in the gig economy.
The resulting financial exhaustion of the working and middle classes. American families employed three coping mechanisms to maintain their standard of living. First, they simply worked longer hours. Second, women entered the paid workforce in massive numbers, creating the dual-income household out of necessity. Third, the other measures reached their limit, they tapped into the equity in their homes, until 2008
The US Bureau of of Labour had three hypotheses for factors driving the labour compensation – productivity gap:
Globalisation: Increased offshoring shifted production and service activities to other countries. Consequently, income that might have previously gone to domestic workers was reallocated to intermediate purchases and foreign labour.
Increased Automation: As technological automation increases, the overall need for human labor input drops. When machines replace workers, the share of income dedicated to capital naturally increases relative to the share dedicated to labor.
Faster Capital Depreciation: Modern business capital, such as computer hardware and software, degrades or becomes obsolete much faster than the heavy machinery used in previous decades. Because these assets must be upgraded or replaced more frequently, a higher share of industry income must be diverted away from wages to cover these ongoing capital replacement costs
When the report explored specific industry sectors such as electrical power generation and supply, the divergence correlated with a fourth factor, deregulation. This happened to the US energy market in 1992.
The Energy Policy Act, 1992 created domestic competition. Incumbent local monopolies became more efficient or went under. Productivity was achieved through new technology and aggressive cost-cutting including layoffs. Workers produced far more value per hour, but because the company is fighting to keep prices low to compete, wages didn’t rise at that same rate.
Two trust economies exist
But all of these factors didn’t impact across society equally. What Edelman’s Trust Barometer acknowledged, but didn’t highlight at the time was the existence of two trust economies existing in the same space, but for different people.
The top quartile of income earners trusted the system. The bottom quartile didn’t. This was mirrored in findings by other organisations, notably the OECD’s Government at a Glance 2025 report and UNU WIDER Trust in a changing World 2025 paper.
There is a decline in governmental trust documented by the Pew Research Center Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025 – a consistent downward trend much longer than 1999, back as far as the mid-1960s for the American public, much earlier than Edelman’s work seems to suggest.
Business and consumer grievance
Edelman posits that businesses have become more trusted than governments. It’s a comforting anchor for a business that sells corporate reputation work. The reality may be different. The decline in government trust has merely set a very low bar according to research by Bentley University and Gallup. The rise of zero-sum thinking exemplified by Zero-sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), will sweep business attitudes along as part of systemic distrust. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace posits that this zero-trust thinking has brought conflict within the US itself and driven protests around the world – globalised consumer grievance.
The Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University documented an increase in political violence risk factors across the US mirroring the 1960s and early 1970s . German insurance company Allianz warned that this behaviour represented a risk to large businesses across their operations and supply chains. This is outside and separate to government military actions like the US – Iran conflict or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
There are problems inside organisations as well. Employer trust has been in decline according to Edelman. The causes are diverse and amplify consumer grievance:
Managers are supervising but failing to manage. They struggle to coach or develop their staff sufficiently.
Media sector consumer grievance
The media business is seeing the impact first hand. Fear of deliberate deception is at the cente of the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report for 2025. That fear is driving growing divisions in society and between societies, further feeling consumer grievance. According to The Reuters Institute Digital News Report of the same year these concerns about deception are driving audiences away from ‘legacy’ media companies to platforms of editorialists and opinion formers across podcasts, YouTube and other social platforms.
Edelman claims that this audience migration is down to beliefs about the motivations of media organisations. 75 percent of high-grievance respondents believe news organisations would rather attract a big audience than report what people actually need to know. 67 percent believe the media prefers to support an ideology over informing the public.
On slight glimmer from Edelman’s data was that trust in traditional media dropped by four points, versus trust in search engines dropping by five. But that delta will be cold comfort to media executives watching their business being eaten alive by technology platforms.
Goodwill on the balance sheet
Goodwill on the balance sheet of a company tries to capture brand value, the value of customer relationships and wider stakeholder trust within a business. PwC research provided some empirical evidence to support RoI on the stakeholder trust component of goodwill. But Edelman overreaches in its 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Growth in an Insular World report to try and do the same with brand value. In this case, Edelman tries to use survey responses, rather than observed behaviour data and the scientific method to try and overturn several decades of validated marketing science research.
Consumer grievance: so what?
It’s very easy to ignore consumer grievance as ethereal fiction or background noise. Being part of the solution can end up being part of the problem.
Brand purpose real talk
For some brands it make sense to pick a side, but if you do commit to the brand purpose. It may cost you, but if you really have a brand purpose, or ‘higher purpose’ as David Aaker called it, then the 30% opportunity cost in marketing effectiveness is worth it in your calculus.
Effectiveness expert Les Binet’s two question test on brand purpose makes a lot of sense:
Would you still do it if you couldn’t publicise it?
Would you still do it if reduced your long term profits?
If the answer to either question is no, then it’s not purpose driven.
Brand purpose can be a struggle to retrofit. After the success of Dove being re-positioned from a functional product to the ‘real beauty’ positioning; Unilever looked to replicate the effect with varying degrees of success.
You also need to be aware of brand purpose not being global. Apple, Meta and Nike have made decisions in Asia that are vastly different to what they do in western markets. There is no coherence or congruency in their world view. Neoliberal universal values died in corporations long before they were devalued in mainstream western political discourse. Both the online world and social media will shine a spotlight on this difference. This perceived corporate hypocrisy will increase consumer grievance and reduce consumer trust in the brand to do ‘the right thing’.
You could make the argument that Apple, Meta and Nike all fail Binet’s brand purpose test.
Outside of geopolitical differences, even the most basic demographic differences can be landmines for brand purpose. It’s an accelerant for consumer grievance and one that marketers at the likes of Unilever and P&G have either ducked, or got tonally wrong.
Patagonia is arguably the most prominent brand purpose led brand, yet it faces a slew of dilemmas. You could argue that Patagonia’s self description as being ‘a work in progress‘ is at best a temporary fix with an uncertain sell-by date during a time of consumer grievance.
Brand promise
The brand promise is the idea of what a consumer can expect from the product or service that they are purchasing. There is a temptation to reduce costs. You see this with automated services and reduced sized packaging.
If you are transparent about the trade-off consumers will self-select and be fine with it. Telecoms companies have been doing this for years.
Plusnet – BT’s no-frills ISP
Voxi – Vodafone’s self service brand that comes at a discounted price
Does your consumer journey penalise behaviour instead of rewarding loyalty. if it does, that will fuel consumer grievance. Audit these friction points and act on them. Fix underlying operations-related grievances and the customer lifetime revenue will take care of itself.
I was thinking a lot about consumption when I came across the psychological concept of moral licensing. Doing something that is thought of as a good behaviour boosts the self image, leading to a sense of justification in a more indulgent behaviour later on.
It explains incongruity in human behaviours. One example that immediately came to mind when I first read about the concept of moral licensing occurred very early in my agency career.
Burger queen
The agency was one of an expanding number of American shops that had set up in London. I was a piss-poor excuse of client services person; but was widely read, had a sharp-thinking strategic head on my shoulders and sounded uncharacteristically authoritative in technology client presentations.
One of the London office’s senior executives was English but as part of their degree secondment had spent some time in the US. Later on, they were working in the Bay area on high technology and consumer brand accounts.
During that time, they became a Buddhist and were vegan except for the regular Big Mac meal in the office, or, going to and from a new business pitch.
Given that the global CEO functioned on sipping vodka out of a constantly topped up glass, with periodic runs to the local Starbucks for jolts of iced quadruple expressos, the Big Mac eating vegan behaviour was considered only mildly eccentric by comparison.
Wellness
While my burger queen experience is mildly amusing to recollect, moral licensing has a serious health and wellness impact. The consumer wellness market has a moral vocabulary that positions food as a “sinful” indulgence or a “purifying” virtue, and physical exercise as a moral redemption mechanism. This moral framing is a critical structural vulnerability. When wellness, nutrition, and wearable technology brands construct campaigns using moralised binaries, this trigger subconscious moral licensing.
Higher levels of moral licensing, self-licensing, or compensatory health beliefs (CHBs) are associated with elevated body weight (BMI), increased caloric intake, or heightened body image anxiety.
The fipside of this is the ‘health as an alibi’ for slim people who are often judged as excessively vain or narcissistic.
Finally research from North Caroline State University found that customer reward programmes drove long-term consumption habits. They that consumers who regularly purchased lower-calorie meals indulged more when reward opportunities occurred. They had a higher probability of trading rewards for indulgent high-calorie items and desserts. When questioned, they used their prior calorie dietary discipline to justify it.
Luxurious moral licensing
There is a well known link between relative preferences for luxury items and a previously expressed virtuous intent. This might be a donation of time or money to a charity allowing consumers to establish ‘moral’ credentials. An example that taps directly into this is Balenciaga‘s capsule collections that collaborate with the likes of the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
This boost to their virtuosity mitigates the negative feelings and anticipatory guilt typically associated with purchasing frivolous or expensive items. In research it is found to double consumer intent to purchase high-end consumer goods.
However moral licensing isn’t all plain sailing for luxury brands. There is a tension between luxury brand attributes of self-enhancement and status with moral licensing being related to self transcendence and altruism. Consumers experience the mismatch which negatively affects brand evaluation.
Moral licensing examples in advertising
Moral licensing is tapped into in indulgent advertising. A classic example is the current framing in Müller Corner yoghurts.
Moral licensing was leaned on very heavily during the golden age of TV advertising.
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.
