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.
AI reckoning as a term is a rather stark warning. Even more so when it comes from Aswath Damodaran who is a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at NYU (New York University).
The reckoning that Damodaran is concerned about is a ‘Minsky moment‘ and represents a stark contrast to the boundless techno-optimism of Marc Andreessen.
The AI reckoning wasn’t on the mind of investors who bought into Cerebras Systems.
Cerebras Systems makes wafer sized chips with memory and processing on the same die. This reduces latency and increases speed. As cool as Cerebras Systems technology is, the company currently has sales of $510 million and was valued on its opening day of trading at $71 billion.
AI-Powered Cyberattacks | Robert Scoble and A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify.. The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.” All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.
Disclosure: this analysis of Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings does not constitute financial advice. It is not a recommendation to buy or sell Omnicom or any other company mentioned in the post. Instead it’s about trying to understand the dynamics underpinning one of the largest actors in brand marketing.
The headlines surrounding Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings, shows a growth in top-line earnings of 69.2% to hit $6.242 billion. That topline number looks like market dominance following Omnicom’s $13.5 billion all-stock acquisition of IPG.
Core operations performance
There is more nuance in the details. I looked at the ‘core operations’ metric to look for signs of momentum. The core operations reporting framework is designed to reflect Omnicom’s, ongoing business by excluding the financial results of businesses that are already disposed of, or, are classified as held for sale on the balance sheet.
This grew by 6.7% according to Omnicom’s Q1 investor presentation. But 2.7% of that number was due to the decline in value of the US dollar. Omnicom’s actual underlying organic growth sits at 3.9%. This number matters, it peels away the acquired revenue to answer is the core business actually winning more money from Omnicom clients?
Relative performance
When you benchmark that 3.9% against their direct competitors, Omnicom sits awkwardly in the middle of a two-tier market.
Publicis Groupe, who posted robust 6.4% organic growth. Publicis is leading the market because they put in structural plumbing years ago. They acquired Epsilon and Sapient early, built a high-margin moat around first-party data and digital business transformation. They sell complex orchestration that CMOs are currently buying.
Stagwell is operating without legacy creative baggage; winning frustrated global clients who want digital-first performance.
Havas continues to lean into its ‘Village’ model. By forcing physical and cultural integration under one roof, they appeal directly to clients who dont want to manage fragmented multi-agency relationships and budgets; even if Havas currently lacks the algorithmic gravity of a Publicis.
WPP posted a net organic revenue decline of 6.7%. WPP has structural issues in its portfolio of agencies that is currently being addressed with the Elevate 28 plan, persistent client losses, and is overexposed to a stagnating technology sector client base.
Direction change
The nature of Omnicom’s revenue is shifting in a way that distorts its apparent size. The holding company is aggressively pivoting toward “principal media buying,” a model where they purchase advertising inventory in bulk, assume the financial risk, and resell it to clients with an undisclosed markup.
Omnicom aggressively sunset historic brands like DDB and FCB to hit a massive $1.5 billion synergy target, they prioritised financial speed over operational stability.
Clients do not buy holding company P&L synergies; they buy specific team chemistry, cultural nuance, and dedicated attention.
Mashing competing agencies together in highly competitive, over-brokered markets like London, Omnicom triggered client flight. Back before the Interpublic deal, some estimates 60% of Interpublic and Omnicom scopes of work were allegedly already understaffed.
Omnicom chose to shrink to grow, but in doing so, they actively risked alienating the CMOs needed to fund Omnicom’s pivot into integrated media.
Accounts well told
This approach transforms Omnicom from an hourly fee-for-service agency into a media arbitrage focused business. Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings relies heavily on gross revenue reporting, which includes massive pass-through media costs, their top-line figures look artificially ‘explosive’ compared to it’s competitors who report on a net revenue basis.
On a reported GAAP basis, Omnicom’s operating margin dropped to 10.4%, crushed under the weight of $59.4 million in IPG integration costs and $34.3 million in losses from the disposal of non-core assets. Omnicom are relying on adjusted, Non-GAAP EBITA metrics, which ignore the friction of the merger, to show a margin expansion to 14.8%.
A second distortion is the narrative around the agencies to be sold, on the analyst call John Wren estimated that the agencies being sold had a margin of less than 10%. Which could led those not paying attention to assume that the core businesses would be more profitable; but that may not be the case, despite Omnicom’s leadership’s intention to permanently elevate it’s margin profile.
Opaque picture
There seemed to be an uneven performance across geographic territories and business units. At the time of the IPG deal, health was considered to be one of the biggest opportunities, yet, seemed to have a low single-digit organic growth trajectory, outperformed by PR and experiential agencies.
Omnicom’s gross long-term debt had expanded to $9.977 billion, up from historical norms, as it absorbed IPG’s existing debt load, $1.7 billion in new U.S. dollar notes alongside €600 million in Euro notes to refinance operations and ensure liquidity.
Every source used in the post can be found in the more information section below.
