Ged Carroll

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  • February 2026 newsletter – get up & run edition

    February 2026 introduction – (31) get up & run edition

    I am now at issue 31, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘get up & run’. In Cantonese 31 isn’t a famous lucky number, it could considered to mean ‘life first’ implying an importance of vitality. On the plus side, it doesn’t have negative connotations of say 14 – which sounds similar to definitely die.

    #run

    I was sent a mix by an old friend of mine done by Frankie Bones at Amnesia House in August 1990 – as aural history its a fascinating treasure trove and occurred a pivotal time with several genres about to fragment from the original UK scene. Now we have our soundtrack let’s get into it.

    New reader?

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

    SO

    Things I’ve written.

    I appeared in the What’s In My Now newsletter talking small wallets, cheaper alternatives to Apple Studio monitors and making better use of LLMs. More here.

    I gave a presentation for Outside Perspective on my Dot LLM era paper. Here is my speaking notes that I prepared as I got the presentation ready, complete with the slides at the relevant points.

    I spoke to the WSJ about my dot LLM era thinking and was name-checked on their Take On The Week podcast. And I compared my research with Marc Andreessen’s of A16z 2026 AI outlook here.

    I wrote a letter to the FT about Sony surrendering its home entertainment business (TVs, home audio) to Chinese TV maker TCL. While Sony’s current involvement in sectors such as elder care and insurance are worthy endeavours – what does it mean when they are more core to Sony’s identity than the home entertainment equipment that the brand built its empire on?

    As well as being a concerned Sony customer, I was also thinking about what it means to a brand when it gets rid of its core raison d’être? You can read my letter here.

    I was talking to a friend about classic films and suddenly Matthew Frank’s newsletter dropped in my inbox and started me down a rabbit hole exploring the idea of forgettable cinema as part of the modern public zeitgeist.

    I pulled together a collection of adverts and campaigns celebrating lunar new year from across Asia and a couple aimed at the wider diaspora. As brands look to benefit from the year of the fire horse.

    ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn

    1. Publicis widening the business gap versus its rivals. A decade spent preparing their data and foundational technology for machine learning.
    2. WPP’s big pivot to adapt to market conditions for the large holding companies.
    3. Dentsu’s change of leadership to better control strategy and manage global capabilities.
    4. What Google’s AI bet means for advertisers.
    5. Michael Farmer on why reorganisation isn’t strategy, instead strategy should drive any reorganisation to meet the strategic objectives. This one proved a bit controversial, I’m not sure why.

    Books that I have read.

    While I have been looking forward for David McCloskey’s latest book The Persian to come out, I managed to finish The Seventh Floor. On one level The Seventh Floor is about espionage and feels very now given the new cold war. But it’s also about friendship, loyalty and personal betrayal. McCloskey doesn’t only bring expertise from a past career at the CIA, but also a deep love of the espionage novel as an art form and this novel gives a nod and a wink to the works of John Le Carré.

    While the agency world is focused on the rise of AI, I decided to revisit Michael Farmer’s Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies. Ten years after it has been published, the diagnosis and the lessons from Farmer’s research seem to have been ignored by clients and the c-suites of holding groups. One thing I picked up on my revisiting the book was the challenge in defining strategic contribution and effort to campaigns. With creative output, Farmer managed to break down creative tasks into fixed ScopeMetric® Units (SMUs). But Farmer admitted that he couldn’t define strategy outputs in the same way because the context changed account-by-account. This makes sense given the difficulties I have had in the past when strategists were way oversold by the project management function within agencies.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Insularity was the watch word of this year’s Edelman’s Trust Barometer. It was a pretty dark vision of the future. There is a huge delta between top income quartile of the population and their trust of authority and the bottom income quartile. In the lower quartile group there is little to no trust in authority figures (business, journalists, government). They only trust people like them.

    Andrew Tindall published a new book for System1 based on their research and Effie data which reinforces previous publications by Orlando Wood, Les Binet, Peter Field and Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. It also reinforces the importance of context as part of creativity when media and creative functions are co-joined at the hip. It’s very readable and available for free here.

    Chart of the month. 

    The surge of US measles infections turned into a politicised debate about vaccinations, competence, why Canada’s rates were even higher and whether things were as bad as experts would have you believe?

    The chart only tells part of the story.

    measles

    The US CDC cites a general hospitalisation rate of about 20% (1 in 5 cases), recent years have seen significant fluctuations depending on the specific age groups and regions affected by measles outbreaks.

    The “Age Factor”: The high rates in 2022 and 2024 were largely due to the virus hitting children under five—the age group most likely to develop severe complications like pneumonia.

    • 2022 – driven by an outbreak in Ohio, which had a high paediatric hospitalisation rate.
    • 2024 – remained high throughout the year with nearly half of cases affecting children under 5.

    Outbreak Size vs. Severity: In 2025, even though the total case count surged, the percentage of people requiring hospital care fell. This often happens when an outbreak moves beyond high-risk “pockets” into a broader, sometimes older, population.

    • 2023 – outbreaks in unvaccinated high-risk clusters.
    • 2025 – hospitalisation rates dropped because the virus spread to older demographics and larger, but less severe clusters
    • 2026 – infections in January had few children under 5 affected. Cases were able to be managed at home.

    Vaccination Impact: Across all these years, the vast majority (over 90%) of hospitalised patients were either unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.

    Canada’s rates are high because the population has a significant amount of unvaccinated immigrants and refugees from conflict zones and the developing world.

    Things I have watched. 

    Thomas Harris’ Silence of The Lambs still has legs in culture. Which is why Amazon Prime Video has gone back to the universe with Clarice. The story takes place in the aftermath of the buffalo Bill killings which drove the plot of Silence of the Lambs. The storytelling is top notch with a fantastic plot twist in episode 1. It is well worth your time to at least give the first few episodes a chance.

    It started off in an unpromising way, several years ago a friend left a DVD with me. They said something along the lines of they liked a number of Werner Herzog films, but that this was too weird for them. I finally got to sit down and watch Fata Morgana.

    It doesn’t have a story, but is beautifully shot footage of the Sahara and Sahel in 1969 with a focus on near horizon mirages (from which the film gets its name) and features the human effect on it from vistas of oil processing equipment to barbed wire and crashed planes.

    There is a poetic narration in German over the top with a range of music to flt the landscapes. It feels like a forerunner of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi made a decade later. It’s easy to watch.

    I spent a weekend with my Dad going through old VHS cassettes and on one of them we found Four Fast Guns. It is a surprisingly good Hollywood western. While not a John Ford film, it has a grittiness due to superior character development and tight storytelling reminiscent of the very best spaghetti westerns. The film was produced by an independent studio and featured three well recognised character actors as its star performers.

    • Edgar Buchanan acted alongside the likes of Clint Eastwood, James Garner, John Wayne, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott he went on to appear in several TV series that I remember watching on repeat as a child in Ireland including The Beverley Hillbillies and The Twilight Zone.
    • Martha Vickers had appeared in The Big Sleep alongside Lauren Bacall.
    • James Craig had acted alongside everyone from John Wayne to Boris Karloff.

    This gave the director much more creative freedom to make the performances pop on-screen. The climatic plot twist is very good.

    I was inspired by watching Reflection in a Dead Diamond last month to watch Danger: Diabolik. The psychadelic motifs of and dream sequences of Reflection in a Dead Diamond seemed to draw from European cinema’s brief flirtation with super spy and super villain films during the 1960s. Danger: Diabolik was Mario Bava’s and Dino DeLaurentis’ take on the French Fantômas film series.

    Bava’s expertise in genre films and special effects gives Danger: Diabolik a more sophisticated look than you would give it credit. Add in the film’s 1960s modernist aesthetic, James Bond type action sequences and you have a winning film. The humour-heist plot is very of its time but still entertaining and cried out for a remake. Terry-Thomas’ character performance as a government minister in the film is one of brilliance.

    Useful tools.

    I was saddened to read of the demise of The World Fact Book published by the CIA. I found it invaluable as a starting point when getting up to speed on international campaigns on parts of the world that I hadn’t visited. It even helped me win some work with Telenor Myanmar back before the current military regime got back into power. According to this post on the CIA website the World Fact Book is going away.

    This personal productivity playbook by CJ Casseili was interesting to read and some of you may find tips and tricks that you can apply in your own work and personal life.

    Ilina Scott’s quick guide to AI tools for strategists is worth a read if you are just dipping your toe in the field.

    Occasionally software comes along what doesn’t become a mainstream success, but is well loved and much missed when it disappeared. Apple’s HyperCard was one, another was Yahoo! Pipes. The idea behind Pipes has been resurrected and in its latest iteration is very useful, even in a time of AI-with-everything.

    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.

    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, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, 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.

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my February 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and good luck with your new year’s resolutions. As an additional treat here is a link to a presentation I gave to the Outside Perspective crew, in Adobe Acrobat format. 

    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.

    Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.

  • 2026 AI outlook of Marc Andreessen

    2026 AI outlook introduction

    Marc Andreessen’s 2026 AI outlook was published by A16z. As one of the leading funder of Silicon Valley startups, his world view matters.

    TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 - Day 2

    I’ve gone through and contrasted his 2026 AI outlook through the lens of the viewpoint I researched and wrote up. The core point over where we differ: Andreessen see’s the dawn of a new unbound industrial revolution. Whereas I think that the upside he sees is hard to navigate to; and also risk mirroring the echoes of financial bubbles past in many of the high profile pure play AI companies like OpenAI or C3.ai.

    Andreessen has been the quintessential techno-optimist for at least the past two decades with his emblematic essay Why Software Is Eating the World. His worldview is of an industry where demand is insatiable and revenue is undeniably real.

    Like Andreessen in his 2026 AI outlook, I would agree that players like Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft are making money to variable degrees from their AI offerings as part of cloud computing and productivity software bundles.

    But in my view there are two aspects of concern:

    • Pure plays with the notable exception of Anthropic don’t seem to have a clear path to profitability in a time period that would match their implied future revenues based on loans and valuations.
    • Hyperscalers like Meta and Microsoft are using unusual partnerships to fund their infrastructure and have been inconsistent over how fast they would depreciate their AI computing hardware.

    Both Mr Andreessen and myself agree that we are witnessing a technological shift of seismic proportions, arguably, “bigger than the internet” as he put it.

    I think that change will happen slower in the short term due to an economic sand box acting as a rate limiter on infrastructure and derived labour efficiencies. In particular, the economic viability of the infrastructure being built to support it.

    The Nature of the Boom: Real Revenue or Irrational Exuberance?

    A key question is the the solidity of the current market.

    For Andreessen, the AI boom is not a speculation fuelled exercise but a demand-driven reality. He argues that unlike the early internet, which required years of physical infrastructure build-out before finding business models, AI is generating cash immediately.

    “This new wave of AI companies is growing revenue like… actual customer revenue, actual demand translated through to dollars showing up in bank accounts at like an absolutely unprecedented takeoff rate.”

    Andreessen points to “revealed preferences”, observed insight from what people do is more insightful than what they say when asked by market researchers. While the US and European publics express fear of job losses, they are simultaneously adopting AI tools at a fast pace.

    My “Dot LLM Era” report, however, suggests this revenue may be dwarfed by the capital expenditure required to generate it. 

    It posits that the sector faces a “self-defeating economic” cycle. The report highlights that the current valuations of the “Magnificent 10” tech giants (including Nvidia, Microsoft, and Alphabet) imply a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 35 times. This is alarmingly close to the S&P 500’s P/E ratio at the peak of the dot-com boom, which approached 33.

    In the report I warn that current valuations assume LLMs will drive revenue growth by $1–4 trillion in the next two years. 

    If this growth is achieved through massive job automation, the resulting unemployment could depress the very economy needed to sustain these companies. Like the 2008 financial crisis, this would invite various forms of regulatory intervention.

    This implies a sweet spot between speed of productivity gains versus efficiencies in terms of job losses realised by clients – and acts as a break on the velocity of adoption.

    The Infrastructure Trap: The Amortisation Crisis

    Perhaps the most critical technical divergence between our viewpoints concerns the hardware powering this revolution.

    The “Dot LLM Era” report introduces a chilling concept: Amortisation Risk. It draws a comparison to the “telecoms bubble” of the late 90s, where companies laid massive amounts of fibre optic cable.

    • The Telecoms Analogy: Fibre optic cable had a useful life of over a decade, meaning even after the companies went bust (like WorldCom), the infrastructure remained useful for Web 2.0.
    • The AI Reality: Modern AI infrastructure relies on GPUs and TPUs. These processors have a useful life of only 3 to 5 years before becoming technically obsolete.

    The report argues that if an AI bust occurs, the hardware will not be waiting for a resurgence; it will be electronic waste. 

    Hyperscalers are currently lengthening the assumed useful lives of this hardware in their financial filings—Google to 6 years, Meta to 5 years—which the report suggests may artificially overstate profits and adversely affect competitors with debt securitised against AI data centre hardware.

    The rapid obsolescence of chips represents a “financial and technological amortisation risk” that could lead to trillions in write-offs, similar to the $180 billion loss left by WorldCom.

    Andreessen views this hardware cycle through a different lens: Elasticity.

    He acknowledges that massive investment leads to gluts, but argues that “the number one cause of a glut is a shortage”. He believes the price of AI compute is falling “much faster than Moore’s Law”.

    As prices collapse, demand will expand exponentially. If chips become cheap and plentiful, AI can be embedded into everything, moving from massive “God models” in data centres down to small models running on local devices.

    Geopolitics: The US-China Race

    Both Andreessen and I agree that the AI landscape is a bipolar contest between the United States and China, but their assessments of the leaderboard differ.

    Andreessen frames this as a “new Cold War” where the US must maintain dominance. He is encouraged by the “DeepSeek moment”, referring to a powerful open-source model released by a Chinese hedge fund. To him, this proves that catching up is possible and that the US cannot rest on its laurels. He advocates for open source as a way to proliferate American standards globally.

    I offer a more sobering assessment of American pre-eminence. I argue that unlike the 1990s “Long Boom,” where the US was the undisputed hegemon; the current era is defined by high debt and strong competition. The US maybe on the Soviet side of a Reagan era ‘Space Defence Initative (aka Star Wars)’ AI race from an economic perspective.

    • Alibaba’s Qwen model claims to deliver comparable performance to American models while requiring 82% fewer Nvidia processors to run.
    • China doesn’t have a electrical power crunch in the same way that western data centres have due to its sustained investment in coal, nuclear, gas and renewable power sources.
    • Even Silicon Valley investors and major companies like Airbnb are opting for Chinese open-source models because they are “way more performant and much cheaper”.

    Andreessen worries about regulation stifling US innovation, I think that the real geopolitical threats are:

    • China’s ability to operate largely immune to US sanctions, smuggling chips and utilising data centres in neutral geographies like Malaysia.
    • China’s speed at propagating the use of AI within its own populace, driving utility at a lower cost per token than their US competitors with state regulation defining trial ‘sand pits’. This will drive new uses faster in China and in China’s client states across the global south.

    The Outcome: Transformation or “Minsky Moment”?

    Where is this all heading? Andreessen is betting on a future where AI becomes as ubiquitous and essential as electricity. He envisions a “pyramid” structure: a few massive “God models” at the top, cascading down to billions of specialised, cheap models running on edge devices. He admits these are “trillion-dollar questions,” but his firm is aggressively investing in every viable strategy.

    I think that LLMs will make a sustained technological impact, but it will be limited in velocity by economic boundaries. In the “Dot LLM Era” report, I outlined seven potential scenarios, ranging from total transformation to total collapse. Currently, it assigns a ~95% likelihood to the “Moral Hazard” scenario.

    • The Moral Hazard: This scenario posits that major AI players will be considered “too big to fail” due to national security imperatives. Governments will step in with loan guarantees and subsidies to backstop the massive infrastructure debts, effectively nationalising the risk . Rather like the banks during the 2008 financial crisis.
    • The Telecoms Bust: With a ~75% likelihood, the report fears a “Minsky Moment”, a sudden market collapse driven by the realisation that cash flows cannot cover the massive debts incurred to build short-lived data centres.

    Comparative Summary of Perspectives

    FeatureMarc Andreessen (The techno-optimist)My own view (The economic limiting skeptic)
    Current PhaseInning 1. “Biggest technological revolution of my life.”Phase 1: The boom / The Inflation of a bubble.
    RevenueReal, unprecedented, showing up in bank accounts.Potentially illusory for at least some players; reliant on untenable cost savings.
    InfrastructureShortages lead to gluts; cheap chips drive adoption.Amortisation risk: hardware obsolescence in 3-5 years.
    PricingUsage-based is great for startups; prices falling fast.Pure-play LLMs selling tokens below marginal cost (burning cash).
    GeopoliticsA race the US must win; open source is key.US dominance challenged; Chinese models are more efficient and effective enough for organisations from Singapore to Silicon Valley to adopt them.
    OutcomeLong-term ubiquity; widespread prosperity.Technological change bounded by economic limitations. Current high risk of “Minsky Moment” or government bailouts.

    Conclusion: The Trillion-Dollar Questions

    Marc Andreessen candidly admits that “companies… need to answer these questions and if they get the answers wrong, they’re really in trouble”. His firm’s strategy is to bet on everything: large models, small models, apps, and infrastructure. He is doing this on the assumption that the aggregate wave will lift all boats.

    My ‘Dot LLM Era’ report offers a counterweight to this enthusiasm. A bubble decouples technological and financial progress. Technological utility does not always equal investor profit. As I note in ‘Dot LLM Era’, “Bubbles don’t kill technology from moving forwards”. The internet did change everything, but it also wiped out trillions in shareholder value along the way.

    The defining question for the next five years is whether the demand for AI can grow fast enough to pay for the hardware before that hardware becomes obsolete.

    If Andreessen is right, this elasticity of demand would save the day. If I am right, we may be heading for the most expensive recycling project in human history.

    The Productivity Paradox and Society

    A fascinating tension exists between Andreessen’s view of societal adoption and my own macroeconomic warnings regarding productivity and labour.

    The “Wingman” Economy vs. The Phillips Curve

    Andreessen describes a “symbiotic relationship” where AI acts as a productivity multiplier: a “wingman” for doctors, coders, and writers. He argues that higher pricing in SaaS can actually benefit the customer by funding better R&D, suggesting a cycle of value creation.

    I argue that the wingman sweetspot is optimal but tricky to land, in the report I showed the risk through a darker macroeconomic “thought experiment.” It used the Phillips Curve and Okun’s Law to model what happens if Andreessen AI scenario succeeds too well.

    • The Thought Experiment: If AI automation generates $1 trillion in cost savings through job cuts, it implies approximately 10.5 million unemployed US workers.
    • The Consequence: Such a spike in unemployment could trigger deflation and a massive drop in GDP. This is “self-defeating economics”: the hyperscalers need a healthy economy to consume their services, yet their success might undermine the investor, enterprise customer and consumer base.

    Andreessen counters this fear by citing historical context. He notes the “Committee for the Triple Revolution” in 1964, warned Lyndon B. Johnson that automation would ruin the economy—a prediction that proved false. He believes AI will follow the path of electricity or the internet: initially terrifying, eventually indispensable.

    Automation did displace a massive amount of developed world jobs moving at a much slower pace than Andreessen predicted for AI. Electricity moved at an equally slow pace compared to the pace envisioned by AI’s champions.

    The Open Source Debate

    Both of us agree that the role of open source is pivotal in both narratives.

    For Andreessen, open source is the great accelerator. He marvels at how knowledge is proliferating: “Some of the best AI people in the world are like 22, 23, 24”. He views the leak of knowledge as inevitable and beneficial for US competitiveness, provided the US stays ahead.

    I analysed the “Red Hat Analogue.” It suggests that in the dot-com era, open-source (Linux) won, but the companies that built the models (or distributions) mostly failed, with Red Hat being the notable exception.

    I assigned a ~70-80% likelihood to the “Red Hat Model,” where pure-play LLM creators (like OpenAI or Anthropic) might struggle to justify their capital burn as open-source models like Meta’s Llama or Alibaba’s Qwen commoditise the intelligence.

    We have already seen Singapore’s national AI programme drop Llama for Alibaba’s Qwen, reinforcing the idea that the value might accrue to those who service the models, not those who create them.

    Final Thoughts

    The divergence between Marc Andreessen and my own analysis is not about whether AI works both of us would agree that the technology can be magical and transformative. The disagreement is about who pays for it, how that affects the velocity of AI and who profits.

    Andreessen sees a future of abundance where falling prices drive infinite demand.

    My own view sees a future of financial reckoning shaping the 2026 AI outlook where shorter hardware lifespans and brutal competition erode margins, setting a slower pace at which we reach Andreessen’s abundance. 

    Andreessen’s viewpoint reminded me a lot of mid-20th century aspirations for nuclear power. Nuclear power offered a similar vision in the mid-20th century of electricity too cheap to meter. That was never close to being achieved in the likes of France – arguably the most passionate adopter.

    As with the railway mania of the 1840s or the optical fibre boom of the 1990s, society may inherit a significant infrastructure, with a shorter lifespan built on the ashes of investor capital.

    Our differing views boil down to a question for the 2026 AI outlook: are we in the “boom” phase, or are we staring down the barrel of the “amortisation crisis”?

    As Andreessen himself concluded, “These are trillion-dollar questions, not answers”.

  • Brand building for B2B PRs

    Brand building for B2B PRs is a write up of an interview that I did with Miles Clayton of Agility PR. We talked about the importance of brand building, client challenges and techniques.

    Participants:

    • Miles: Host (Agility PR)
    • Ged Carroll

    Miles: I’d like to welcome Ged Carroll, a guru on brand building and advertising working with major tech and consumer brands. He offers insight into the world of proper advertising: campaigns we know and love, and, where the industry is leading today.

    Welcome, Ged. Could you talk through what you’re doing at the moment and your current challenges?

    Ged Carroll: Thank you, Miles. I am currently wrapping up an engagement with Google Cloud, working with their internal creative agency as a temporary vendor contractor.

    My work focuses on brand building: out-of-home advertising, video advertising, and events. We look at how those creative experiences come to life through major trade shows and Google-hosted events. There is also sports sponsorship; for instance, the Formula E activation. Even though it’s a B2B brand, many tactics are exposed to a broader audience than just direct customers.

    Miles: That’s fascinating. Regarding brand building, something many brands under-invest in, could you explain why it is important and how it differs from brand activation or performance marketing? I’d argue performance marketing is the obsession in B2B, but why should brand building weigh higher?

    Ged Carroll: I’ll first address why brands focus on performance marketing, then explain brand building’s importance. Brands focus on performance marketing because they are measured on 90-day periods. They can simply say, “Here’s the money spent, here’s the result.” Measures include customer acquisition cost or engagement metrics along a marketing funnel. These seem like concrete measures.

    Why do brand building? Smaller B2B brands often hesitate because of what Professor Byron Sharp calls “Double Jeopardy”: smaller brands have less market penetration and less loyal customers. Consequently, small enterprise software companies have a harder time moving the needle than larger ones. The bigger you are, the better you do; it has a flywheel effect.

    What helps sell product is “mental availability.” If I think B2B PR, you want me to think “Miles.” For chocolate, you think Cadbury. For B2B software, most developers now think AWS. Fifteen years ago, that would have been Microsoft.

    Miles: I sympathise. I’ve worked with brands famous in particular markets that struggled to break into adjacent markets because they hadn’t built the brand there.

    Ged Carroll: That creates a ‘chickenand-egg’ situation: do you invest, or, try a “cargo cult” approach replicating past success? Past success was likely a confluence of luck, timing, and good practice. Many overnight successes are decades in the making.

    Huawei seemed to spring from nowhere but is four decades old. Breaking one customer, BT, made them famous. That fame cracked the market.

    Miles: Brand building is critical. You mentioned that in a typical SaaS subscription business, you should invest about 70% in brand building?

    Ged Carroll: Heuristically, for a subscription business, about 70% should go into brand building and 30% into brand activation.

    Brand building includes PR. I ask: how can we make this idea work for earned media as well? Does the campaign scale to generate “talkability”? People discussing it at the water cooler, in trade magazines, or on social media? Paid media works harder if you have talkability around it.

    Miles: Is that what is now called integrated campaigns?

    Ged Carroll: Integrated campaigns have been around for over 30 years. People used to discuss “media neutral” strategies. The core idea is that your paid media works significantly harder if the campaign generates conversation.

    Miles: That starts with great advertising principles. The book Look Out focuses on “right brain” thinking. Can we discuss the right versus left brain tussle in advertising and how to address it?

    Ged Carroll: Marketing has changed, but our thinking is hardwired by evolution. Analytical procrastination creates cognitive load. If our ancestors sat thinking, “Do I want this or this?”, a predator would have eaten them before they decided.

    Miles: By the time you selected the next iPhone, you’re dead.

    Ged Carroll: Exactly. Logical “System 2” thinking is a difficult construct, yet B2B marketers often communicate rational benefits this way. However, we evolved instantaneous “System 1” thinking, which emotions tap into. If I feel something sharp, I instantly move. That is why we don’t remember a commute unless something significant happens.

    Current advertising often treats us as rational decision-makers, but feelings have a longer-term impact. If I feel sharp stones, I build longer-term thinking to wear sandals next time. Traditionally, advertising tapped into this. Brands like Accenture or Google Cloud attach themselves to emotional events like sports, or consumer ads use storytelling to build memory structures and automatic association.

    Miles: Absolutely.

    Ged Carroll: Procurement processes try to force a rational view, but organisational load often short-circuits this. Do you care where you buy paper clips? No, you go to the fastest place. Brand building gets you onto that procurement shortlist. Furthermore, people aren’t in the mood to buy 95% of the time. Unless you build memory structures while they are inactive, you won’t be considered when they are in the market.

    Miles: Smaller companies can’t afford TV or billboards. What do you advise? I offer thought leadership and education. Tech businesses often say, “You aren’t buying now, but do you want to learn about prompts?” Is that brand building?

    Ged Carroll: It could be. But whose brand is it building? It might just build the LLM model’s brand. My mum asks me to “Ask Google” about crochet patterns. She blames the specific websites for bad patterns, not Google. She associates Google with getting what she wants.

    With thought leadership, are you building the person’s personal brand, or the company brand?

    Miles: That’s an interesting question. I often do personal brand building for the CEO or CTO to express the business vision. But below the C-suite, say a VP of Sales, is it their brand you’re building rather than the company’s? Especially given high turnover.

    Ged Carroll: Exactly. Founder-managers are different; they stay longer. Professional CEOs shipped in by VCs might only stay a few years. B2B marketers face dilemmas, not just choices. It’s about making the best choice within those dilemmas.

    Miles: There are parallels between advertising and B2B marketing, but also budget challenges. Media has changed; 15 years ago, clients bought display ads to build brand. Now, the digital tendency is toward content and performance marketing. Is business stuck in short-term goal-orientated thinking?

    Ged Carroll: It’s not strictly a B2B or B2C problem. We measure what can be coded. Ad-tech stacks are based on interactivity, not marketing science. We assume if someone does X, Y will happen—the sales funnel concept. The sales funnel is an interesting mental model, but it comes from century-old door-to-door sales and assumes rational decision-making and perfect memory through the process.

    Miles: You’re saying consistent brand building short-circuits the funnel, leading straight to the sale.

    Ged Carroll: Yes. When you want a beer, you choose Heineken because it’s in your mind. The consideration process shrinks. Brand building gets you into that consideration process much faster. Regularity is vital to reach people the 95% of the time they aren’t ready to buy.

    Miles: Look Out discusses the narrowing and fragmentation of attention. Are there ways through that?

    Ged Carroll: We have more media opportunities now, but fragmentation occurs because we have smaller gaps of consumption time to fill—like checking a smartphone on the tube. Unless you have repetition within those small gaps, you won’t build memory structures. It’s hard to make a six-second spot emotional.

    You need an integrated approach: emotion and storytelling in long-form content (like a documentary), supported by short content that directs people to it. In B2C, this is easier using brand cues: music, mascots, fonts, colors. Build those cues and stick with them. Marketers often get bored of a campaign and change it, but the audience hasn’t seen it enough. Stick with it.

    Miles: Stick with it.

    Ged Carroll: Many consumer adverts run for years. My dad’s favorite Twix advert is from 2022. Flash has used the same dog and music for five years. Great brand-building campaigns “burn in” rather than “burn out.” Performance marketing might focus on a new feature, but it relies on the brand association already built.

    Miles: It’s been a fascinating discussion crossing advertising, brand building, and B2B marketing. My big takeaway is to encourage more right-brain thinking. Thank you for your time, Ged.

    Ged Carroll: Thank you, Miles. I look forward to chatting again.

    You can watch the interview on video here.

    I gave Miles a reading list in advance of us chatting. Here it is:

  • CNY 2026

    Chinese new year CNY 2026 also known as lunar new year, spring festival or Tết festival. 2026 marks the year of the fire horse. In the same way that the Super Bowl and Christmas are the stand out times of the year for advertising in the US and Europe, CNY 2026 will be the same for much of east Asia and Southeast Asia.

    There has a large amount of tradition and rituals around celebrating the festival, which are rich seams of inspiration for strategists and marketing moments.

    I featured an advert from Brunei for the first time.

    As with previous years, Malaysia had a lot of campaigns running, many of which were partnerships with local musicians to collaborate on a seasonal song. One of the advantages of partnering with local musicians is their ability to cross post on their own channels broadening the videos reach.

    In the Malaysian adverts that were storyteller driven, coping with aging relatives suffering with dementia came through as a common social theme.

    Social video has been a great leveller. I have a featured a few videos from small businesses this year which were nicely executed despite operating with minimal budgets.

    Coca-Cola in China was notable in that it showed strategic thinking closer to what we now see in the west with social-first ‘Instagrammable’ tactics.

    Australia

    Godiva

    Anywhere up to 8 percent of Australia’s population have some connection to China, which explains why Godiva have done a Chinese new year themed range of chocolates.

    Brunei

    Flower Journal

    Flower Journal is a florist shop based in Brunei, yet they have created a cinematic advert with great storytelling. The craft is arguably better than a number of the big brands featured this year. The work by local agency Cinekota really impressed me.

    China

    Adidas

    Adidas made a film about a school football team and focuses on how the team is a ‘football family’. Reuniting with family is an important part of lunar new year. It’s also about looking forward to the future, hence the children’s wishes.

    Apple

    TBWA\ Media Arts, Shanghai teamed up with film director Bai Xue for Apple’s CNY 2026 advertisement. The film joins Apple’s series of ‘shot on an iPhone‘ mini movies.

    Coca-Cola

    Coca-Cola China took a social and experiential approach focused around togetherness. A drone show in Chongqing paired with fireworks that are considered part of China’s intangible cultural heritage was supported by social video clips of a famous father and daughter.

    Coca-Cola-Chinese-New-Year-2026-4

    All of this was to address young adults dual sense of togetherness during spring festival as mainland Chinese call CNY 2026. Being together with friends a la Friends and This Life, as well as more traditional family connections.

    Valentino

    Valentino put relatively subtle lunar new year symbols into a Chinese take on an American diner. The galloping horse zoetrope and red accents throughout the restaurant from neon signs to red floor tiles. As for the film itself, it’s basically a video lookbook.

    Hong Kong

    Hang Seng Bank

    Hang Seng Bank ties into the the importance of welcoming good fortune into your life at Chinese New Year. Celebrities dress as the god of good fortune giving wishes for flourishing prosperity to different neighbourhoods across Hong Kong.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqYWpeDrtZ8

    Malaysia

    AEON

    Japanese supermarket chain AEON did a Malaysian market specific film featuring a mix of well known entertainers. The giddy up line telegraphing its horse related theme and the cultural impact of K-pop is evident in the whole video.

    Affin Bank

    Affin Bank is consistent in their lunar new year campaigns. Each year they tell of how a famous business customer battled adversity to succeed. This time it was Malaysian book retailer BookXcess.

    Affinity

    Affinity is a Malaysian estate agent. The video creative is a pretty run of the mill reenactment of Chinese new year with the horse head mask hinting at the CNY 2026 theme. The song itself is a bit an ear worm.

    Air Selangor

    Air Selangor hits you with a gut punch of an emotional Chinese New Year story that felt like it came straight of the Thai advertising agencies rather than Malaysia. (Thai agencies are famous for wringing you through an emotional shredder leaving you drained after an insurance ad).

    Alpro

    Malaysia’s largest prescription pharmacy chain put together a humorous new year film based around the mechanic of three wishes.

    AmBank

    The film melds together traditions around fabric sharing and lion dance to tell a Chinese new year story of a community coming together.

    Astro

    Astro is a Malaysian holding company that has a mix of linear TV, connected TV and radio assets. Think the reach of the BBC, but a private enterprise.

    Bamboo Green Florist

    Bamboo Green Florist is a single shop business based in Penang. For a small business their Chinese new year advert punches above its weight.

    Coca-Cola

    The first of two appearances in this list by Malaysian group 3P.

    GVRide

    GVRide is a Malaysian ride hailing app, they sponsored a new year song music video by Namewee alongside other brands.

    IJM Land

    IJM Land is a Malaysian property developer (part of a larger conglomerate). They position themselves as “one of Malaysia’s property development”. The film sits at the tension between the love of heritage, accumulating wealth and the non-monetary aspects of CNY 2026 – coming together, family, building memories and legacy.

    JinYeYe

    JinYeYe sell seasonal hampers, so lunar new year is their peak sales time. Their advert is targeted at the global Chinese diaspora and they partnered with Tourism Malaysia alongside local musicians. A bee is considered to a symbol of blessings and represents sweetness, hope and companionship.

    https://youtu.be/0YvLVF4TJAE?si=sn4nMWPwykr7WzjM

    Lee Kum Kee

    Hong Kong’s Lee Kum Lee were the inventors of oyster sauce and have a place in every Asian kitchen cupboard. But their advert is weak sauce (pun intended) that could have been knocked out on PowerPoint.

    Listerine

    Listerine just straight up sponsored the video of Malaysian producers 1119 for this new year themed music video.

    Loong Kee

    Loong Kee is a Malaysian food company who makes everything from processed meats to baked goods. This is at least the third year that they have partnered with local musicians who are internet-famous to collaborate on a new year themed song.

    Lotus

    Lotus supermarket was formerly part of Tesco’s international footprint before the UK brand divested itself of its international stores to Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand (CP) Group. This advert taps into family friction and a couple of nice wushu cinema referencing touches. It reminded me a lot of SingTel’s films from previous years.

    It handles the diversity of Malaysia well, without the awkward approach that Malaysian Airlines went for.

    Malaysian Airlines

    Malaysian Airlines focuses on Malaysians coming home. Given that the airline is a government company. While ethically Chinese, and speaking Chinese at home – the woman is a devote muslim.

    In reality that’s about 1-2% of the ethnic Chinese population – for ethno-political, social and cultural reasons that I don’t want to get into on this post. The video is as much about a government approved theme as it is about the airline.

    Marrybrown

    Marrybrown is a Malaysian quick service restaurant. It is really nice how the story moves through time with relatively small but important cues on screen.

    Maxis

    Malaysian broadband provider took an unusual angle bringing together two erstwhile business rivals in a spirit of shared community.

    McDonalds Malaysia

    Great storytelling but with a serious topic as middle-aged siblings deal with an aging parent with signs of dementia.

    Nescafé Gold

    Instant coffee brand Nescafé Gold goes down the sponsored music video route. But with a few noticeable differences:

    • Better product placement that articulates the customer moment.
    • A more diverse cast than most of the other adverts.
    • The video title Gongxi Kemeriahan – is a mix of mandarin and malay – gongxi meaning best wishes or congratulations and kemeriahan means excitement.

    All of which are likely to because of Nestlé being a western multinational and the marketers are looking to target all Malaysians rather than just ethnic Chinese.

    PMG Healthcare

    PMG Healthcare is a regional provider of pharmacies, medical and dental clinics to private health insurance customers.

    Mr Potato

    Mr Potato is a local potato chip brand in Malaysia. Their CNY 2026 advert is a spoof of the Jackie Chan kung fu film Drunken Master.

    Public Bank

    Public Bank is a Malaysian headquartered bank. This year they have done an AR-based activation. Each Chinese new year you can go into your bank and get a pack of red envelopes and crisp new bills to give out to family, friends and junior colleagues. So this execution makes sense.

    RHB

    Malaysian bank RHB continued its theme of inspiring stories told in previous Chinese New Year campaigns through to its CNY 2026 campaign. This year tells the story of Komuniti Tukang Jahit, a small tailors shop that empowers women through sewing skills and fair income opportunities.

    Setia

    Malaysian house builder Setia takes a lighter comedic approach telling the story of a family’s new year celebration through the eyes of its youngest member. Its lightness of tone is in contrast to other adverts this year which are more of an emotional rollercoaster.

    Shopee

    Singaporean e-commerce platform Shopee partnered with local act 3P to a Chinese New Year song for its Malaysian ad campaign. Thoughout Asia lunar new year songs and playlists are all over TV, films, Spotify and YouTube playlists. This leans right into that trend.

    SPD Racing

    SPD Racing is a small workshop that service motorcycles and sell after market parts. This short video is really nicely executed, replacing parts on the motorcycle with red fittings in the same way that people would wear new red outfits on Chinese new year for good luck.

    https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1x7RpOLHcTA

    Tenaga

    Tenaga is a Malaysian electrical utility. There is a nice bit of storytelling about a lion dance troupe. This could be rerun in future years given its lack of specificity to CNY 2026.

    U Mobile

    U Mobile is a Malaysian wireless operator. Their advert focuses on on the travel use case over lunar new year as more people travel rather than staying at home.

    UCSI University

    USCI is part of Malaysia’s private education system that sprang out of the positive discrimination of successive Malaysian governments towards Malays in comparison to Chinese and South Asian Malaysians. This was enshrined in article 153 of the Malaysian constitution, New Economic Policy, National Development Policy, National Vision Policy and the concept of Ketuanan Melayu which continues to be a pillar of government decision-making.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILuFokNxHck

    In common with several other films here this year it focuses on the treasure of memories built over the festival and also has a dementia plot line.

    Vida C

    Vida C is kind of like an energy drink, in a number of Asian countries high vitamin C content is used in the same way that taurine and caffeine are in western energy drinks. They did a relatively subtle product placement in this comedic music video. It’s much less PC than western multinationals would allow.

    Watsons

    Watson’s is the Boots of Asia. Like previous years it tells a story of family coming together with the joy and chaos that usually ensues. It features Maria Cordero – a Macau born entertainer, radio and TV personality with a famous cooking show based in Hong Kong – but known throughout the region.

    Singapore

    Carlsberg

    Carlsberg launched a pan-Asian campaign with a mix of horse themed packaging design and having it promoted by SKAI ISYOURGOD – a popular Malaysian rapper with appeal across Asia.

    Carlsberg-Year-of-the-Horse-Campaign-1-2

    FairPrice

    Singapore supermarket chain FairPrice focused on the small family moments of the new year celebrations and their ability to build lasting memories. The advert was created by TBWA\ Singapore.

    Grab

    At first I thought that this ad was aimed at the Malaysian market, but I think it’s aimed at both Singapore and Malaysia. It would work in either, even though some of the brands are Malaysia only like JayaGrocer. It’s unusual because of the amount of brand collabs in it, count them:

    • Vinda tissues
    • 7Up
    • GXBank
    • Jasmine SunWhite Rice
    • JayaGrocer
    • Kyochon Chicken
    • Oriental Kopi
    • Subway

    Secondly, there was the filming of an ad within the ad concept that Orson Welles would have enjoyed.

    LVMH

    LVMH’s drinks portfolio has been suffering from declining sales. Family get togethers are an ideal consumption moment, so it makes sense that Hennessy leant in with special packaging and a Singapore family reunion ‘kit’.

    Hennessy-Year-of-the-Horse-Bottles-4

    SIMBA

    Australian owned mobile network SIMBA did a very simple sales promotion which is very much in keeping with its value proposition , but the horses are nicely done.

    Singapore government

    A comedic short film with relatively light social engineering aiming at harmonious relationships and community during CNY 2026. The family were framed as being salt-of-the-earth Singaporean Chinese living in old HDB flat. The universal food photography was very on point.

    Taiwan

    Coca-Cola

    Coke did a really simple sales promotion with a giveaway competition attached to each purchase.

    United States

    Panda Express

    Panda Express is an American fast food chain that specialises in American Chinese food. It kind of sits outside usual lunar new year traditions becoming a Roald Dahl style fantasy.

    Vietnam

    Coca-Cola

    Really simple creative by Coca-Cola. They missed a trick by not creating something as iconic as the US Coca-Cola truck adverts. Instead they phoned in the creative with this spot.

    Ensure Gold

    Abbott Health’s Ensure Gold is a Complan-type drink designed to fortify health and restore strength. The film uses family union traditions to focus on the past, recover during the Tết festival and look to the future with a shared sense of resilience. The theme is even reflected when the family does traditional ancestor worship and we hear the wishes of their departed family.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdSib8exz6I

    Home Credit

    Home Credit are an online financial services company. They provide credit cards, vehicle loans, pre-payment accounts and instalment payments for consumer products. The advert focuses on everyday people and how they prepare for Tết, including decorating the home, getting new clothes and a new karaoke machine for the family gathering.

    Mirinda

    Mirinda is a Vietnamese soft drinks brand similar to Tango. Their adverts were noticeable for their shortness. They were running 3 five-second spots and two 15-second spots. No real story, but there is energy, brand colours feature heavily and it gives off a joyous vibe.

    MyKingdom

    MyKingdom is a Vietnamese toy retailer similar to Toys R Us. Their mobile first content focuses on the challenges of parents looking to buy toys that will last longer than the spring festival.

    https://youtube.com/shorts/EjSu9ybiwwo?si=NWMbimjWHizp9faY

    Sunhouse

    Sunhouse is a home electronics brand. Everything from kitchen appliances to to cookware.

    In the advert, they focus on starting the new year healthy, there is a belief in starting the new year as you would like it to go on.

    Viettel

    Wireless carrier Viettel subverts the idea of a family reunion storyline during Tết. Instead when the family can’t come home, an uncle visits his family members around the country.

    As I find more CNY 2026 campaigns I will add them here.

    Past years

    CNY 2025

    CNY 2024

    CNY 2023

    CNY 2021

    CNY 2019

    CNY 2018

  • Forgettable cinema

    The idea of forgettable cinema came to me while reading Matthew Frank’s newsletter for The Ankler where he repeated a thought exercise that one of his colleagues posed.

    Name five films of this decade that will go down as classics. 

    Okay, I’m waiting.

    …still waiting.

    I consume cinema the way members of Soho House were famed for consuming gak. Also given my movie tastes, you may disagree with what I think of as classics.

    My answer would be:

    • Sinners – vampires in 1920s America amidst a slice of pre-civil rights life in the deep South
    • The Boy and the Heron aka (How do you live?) – A Studio Ghibli film, like everything from Studio Ghibli it’s a masterpiece. Just watch it in Japanese with English subtitles as the English dub is awful.
    • The Order – Jude Law as an FBI field agent in 1970s American Mid-West hunting white supremacists.
    • The Goldfinger – A retelling of a financial scandal in Hong Kong’s go-go era of the 1970s and 1980s. It draws on the story of the Carrian Group which went belly up in the midst of a corruption and fraud scandal. It saw a bank auditor killed and buried in a banana tree grove. Lawyer John Wimbush was found dead in his home swimming pool. A nylon rope around his neck tethered to a concrete manhole cover at the bottom of the pool. The names had to be changed for legal reasons as the main protagonist George Tan was still alive when the film went into production.
    • The Old Woman with the Knife – A film adaptation of a Korean novel about a skilled female assassin coming up to pensionable age. It is a thriller that also addresses an aging Korean society and the invisibility of older people.

    Bonus

    • Oppenheimer – Robert Oppenheimer biopic by Christopher Nolan that is visually amazing and does some interesting things with the storytelling.
    World Cup

    But the point of the thought experiment was the most films now are forgettable cinema and most normal people would have struggled to name five future classic films.

    They are watched by millions – yet never become part of culture. This idea of forgettable cinema used to be a novel idea with only the occasional blockbuster; notably the Avatar series, falling into this category.

    Now Matthew Frank argues that forgettable cinema applies across all film making output. He described the phenomenon as ‘Cinemanesia’.

    Why do we have forgotten cinema?

    The problem might not be the films or the film making, but the change to discover and rediscover films. Frank posits that this is down to the way we now consume media.

    Pre-Netflix, we had:

    • Repeat showings at the cinema, the most prominent example of this for Londoners would be the ‘sing-a-long’ screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
    • Movie marathons and midnight screenings.
    • TV re-runs.
    • TV broadcast movie ‘festivals like Moviedrome.
    • Seasonal standards shown on television, such as Holiday Inn at Christmas time.
    • Movie rental shops like Blockbuster.

    There is comfort and familiarity in their repetition. Just in the same way that adverts build mental models, fame and salience in our heads through repeated exposure – classic films do too.

    Yet we have got to a point where storied film actor / director Robert Redford was better known amongst young adults as the person in the ‘nodding with approval’ man GIF as internet meme, than his film career. The GIF came from Redford’s performance in Jeremiah Johnson.

    By comparison Netflix provides us with a conveyor belt of entertaining enough content. We don’t get to build that depth of relationship through repetition. The business model for TV was different. The right films on the right channel had people tuning in because they wanted the familiar.

    Instead what we have now is the video algorithmic equivalent of the Spotify playlist or the shuffle play of an Apple iTunes library. Like the music our relationship is largely broken – we can choose something that suits our mood or a broad range of interests.

    For most of the time the movies and shows aren’t culture shifting.

    Hellhound as a case in point.

    Hellbound_(TV_series)_title_card

    Others like Korean drama Hellbound (지옥) have cultural relevancy for a brief while before disappearing again.

    hellbound google trends data

    I have used Google Trends as a quick and dirty way of showing this phenomenon.

    Google Trends isn’t search volume, but the rate in change of search volume and web search volume is an indicative rather than absolute measure of consumer interest.

    Channeling my inner Marshall MacLuhan: we have forgettable cinema because the medium is disappearing the message.

    All is not completely lost yet.

    All is not completely lost. I am a member of Letterboxd, which acts as a sort of ‘movies watched’ diary for me, (you can find my profile here). The Letterboxd community hosts challenges for its members like the Criterion challenge that encourages members to watch films from the Criterion collection in each of several different categories. It’s dynamic is reminiscent of the photowalks and meet-ups that built a real world community around Flickr the photo-sharing site and helped many develop an interest in photography.

    More posts similar to this one.