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April 2026 newsletter – 33rd edition aka ‘dirty knee’
April 2026 introduction – (33) dirty knee

This is the 33rd edition of Strategic Outcomes, I had briefly toyed with calling it 33 1/3rd edition – but parked that foolishness as only Jed Hallam and Alec Samways would have half-heartedly smirked at a rather naff DJ dad joke.

In bingo halls ’33’ was announced as dirty knee. For generations past, this would brought up memories of organised sports like winter football games ad the more real-life social activities of playing outside with friends. According to research conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Save the Children back in 2022, only 27% of UK children now play outside.

However, other data, like the UK government’s own The Children’s People and Nature Survey for England: 2025 update implies that number may be higher than the OnePoll research suggests. The University of Exeter published research which seems to be more in line with the UK government’s research. They found that 34 per cent of children don’t play outdoors on school days, while 20 per cent don’t play outdoors on weekends.

In Chinese culture 33 is considered to be a good number. 3 sounds similar to birth or life. Two 3s is considered to intensify or double this idea. Which seems an appropriate sentiment for spring and the beginning of the financial year. Bring it on!

This month’s soundtrack to the newsletter is a sublime 1980s disco mix by Toronto-based Japanese DJ Sakiko Nagai.

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.

A collection of inspiration from Malaysia Airlines mascot Pilot Parker to Sir Martin Sorrell.

Some thoughts how WPP might deal with its Burson dilemma.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Aston Martin issued its third profit warning in a year and sold its Formula 1 naming rights for £50 million to raise cash thanks to internal delays and international tariffs.
2. Meta is projected to pass Google in digital advertising spend thanks to Reels, Threads and WhatsApp.
3. The implications of Tottenham Hotspur being relegated from the Premier League has implications beyond the pitch and into sponsor’s boardrooms.
4. Nike made a bold leap for the UEFA Champions League match ball contract with a bid that doubled the value of the previous Adidas contract.
5. Tom Roach outlined frameworks that help navigate the transition to more sustained growth once initial performance marketing channels hit saturation.
Books that I have read.

My friend Ian lent to me Ikenami Shōtarō‘s book The Killer on The Streets which is part of his Samurai Detectives series. The book follows the adventures of a 60-something retired swordsman and his son as they become embroiled in the hunt for what we’d now call a serial killer.

Things I have been inspired by.

Supply chained

Even before the current debacle in the Persian Gulf, globalisation brought logics and supply chains into high focus. Supply Chained is a new podcast with great presenters that provides top quality analysis on different aspects of global supply chains. The first episode looks at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Generative AI & cooking

I first met Rowan Kisby a decade ago this year at 100 Victoria Embankment, back when I was contracting for Unilever on their Family Brands global range of margarines. Rowan worked for what was then MullenLowe Profero. Recently we reconnected on a shared Slack group. Rowan put together a report on the intersection of generative AI use and cooking.

I found it unsurprising that one of the behaviours consumers are doing is telling the generative AI service what they have in their fridge and asking it for dish / recipe recommendations. Back when I worked for Yahoo! we saw similar behaviours in the search box, particularly amongst US users. Reddit now gave Rowan better qualitative insights on how these results play out.

More interesting from the point of view of retailers was its ability to create and manage a shopping list for weekly groceries. The idea of a retailer or an FMCG building an AI skill (or Gem on Google Gemini) is just begging to be sold in by agencies to their clients.

Praykinson

I got to judge the amazing entries from around the world at Adforum’s PHNX awards. One campaign really stuck with me. A health campaign by Dentsu Creative Thailand and Vajira Hospital in Thailand to help people with Parkinson’s disease was smart, solution-based and had a great insight behind it. More on the project here.

CHESS

I was listening to the MM+M podcast interview with Chris Brandow, head of account management at VCCP Health US and came across the acronym / nemonic CHESS. It comes out of thought leadership research ‘Checking the Memory Code‘ that VCCP did in conjunction with Cowry Consulting.

CHESS looks to encapsulate some of the key attributes that makes marketing creative effective. It codifies marketing science findings that you would be familiar with fromthe likes of, the IPA, System1 and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and provides it in a list that pharma clients and their agency partners can use as a RAG (red-amber-green) guide to evaluating everything from initial creative concepts through to output.
- Character – what be called a fluent object elsewhere. It is a mascot or memorable element like Alexandr the meerkat from Compare The Market. It could also be a spokesperson like Tommy Lee Jones’ appearances in Boss Coffee adverts as ‘Alien Jones‘.
- Humour – the power of humour used to be well known as an advertising device and in recent years has come back on trend at Cannes. It helps create talkability and memorability
- Emotion – Binet and Fields established the power of emotion over rational advertising. Daniel Kahneman conveyed the power of emotional ‘system 1 thinking’ in Thinking Fast and Slow.
- Surprise – the unexpected. Our enjoyment of storytelling is the process understanding which story archetype a tale belongs to. If we guess it easily it falls flat like a Dad joke, on the other hand a twist in the tale makes it memorable.
- Sonic branding – jingles fell out of fashion, yet made ads memorable.
Chart of the month.

Ofcom released their 2026 Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes report, more here. I went back through past reports to look at smartphone only internet access, households with no access to internet and claimed usage of generative AI services.
- Internet access is now at a point comparable to where broadcast television was previously.
- The digital divide is now about the mode of access, with smartphones on mobile internet providing a poorer service.
Things I have watched.

My internet went down on April Fool’s Day, so I revisited Wong Ka wai’s back catalogue. I watched the films the first time after I got a portable DVD player and there was a massive surge in video labels including Artificial Eye and Tartan publishing arthouse titles. This provided a great way to explore and experience world cinema and I gravitated towards Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.

I was familiar with traditional martial arts films and the ‘gun fu’ of John Woo. Wong Ka wai was Hong Kong’s answer to French new wave auteurs. Around the same time, I ended up going out with someone who lived in Hong Kong when we bonded over Faye Wong’s performance in Chungking Express. In a moment of delicious irony, I got to watch Wong Ka wai’s ‘western’ film My Blueberry Nights while staying in Hong Kong.

This time around I was working my way through Curzon’s Wong Kar wai boxset which was bought for my birthday during COVID time. It contained
- As Tears Go By
- Days of Being Wild
- Chungking Express
- Fallen Angels
- Happy Together
- In The Mood For Love
- 2046
More on my time watching The World of Wong Kar wai boxset here. You can enjoy most of the films listed at the Prince Charles cinema ‘The Films of Wong Kar wai season‘.

After all that I needed something a bit lighter, so I watched the Japanese film Supermarket Woman. It is a light hearted comedy caper about a middle aged woman, a poorly performing supermarket, business rivalry and a bit of skullduggery. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Hanako Inouse who brings her customer eye view to revitalising the Honest Goro supermarket. The film was written and directed by Jûzô Itami, better known for Tampopo. Supermarket Woman was made a decade after Tampopo, but both feel of the same time. Itami-san was often compared to the French new wave directors of the 1960s and I can see why.

OSS117 is a series of books and films written from the late 1950s onwards. The films were made in 1963 onwards, with a reinvention and reboot in the 2010s.
- OSS 117 is Unleashed – is a French film about an American agent with French heritage who works for the CIA. Compared to the Bond franchise, its French new wave. No gadgets but a dollop of guile. It’s notable for its underwater scenes, scuba diving was new thing opening up a new world under the waves thanks to Jacques Cousteau.
- OSS 117: Panic in Bangkok – is the first colour film in the series. Our hero goes to Bangkok to investigate a dead colleague who looked into ineffective vaccines.
Useful tools.

PopChar – PopChar is an old but good utility app that has been supporting Mac users since the late 1980s. You are trying to find the right emoji or symbol to type, in each font.

Beats Studio Buds + – while I usually use Shure wired earphones for most applications there are some times that wireless is handier (like reducing wired clutter on a busy desk, or listening to podcasts while cooking or folding laundry).

I was leery of the Beats brand because of their reputation of having a muddy bass sound with a poor sound stage. I was pleasantly surprised by these. They are as balanced sound as a pair of AirPods. They have reasonable noise cancellation, comparable to my old Bose earbuds. They charge on the USB-C cable as my iPhone and MacBook Pro. They are less noticeable than a pair of AirPods and still integrate into Apple’s ‘Find My’ service seamlessly.

Google Gemini app for Mac – I hope that this will help with my current tab and window juggling in Safari. I will let you know how I am getting on in a few months once I have given it a full shakedown.

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 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, 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.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my April 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the May bank holiday.

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 my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
April 29, 2026
The Burson post
Disclosure: a long time ago I worked for a forerunner of Burson and WPP’s dedicated agency for Colgate; Red Fuse. During that time I was based out of Hong Kong.

Later on, I won the Huawei consumer devices AOR business from my old colleagues in Hong Kong.

I know Burson’s current CEO Corey duBrowa from even further back in my agency life, we share a love of the Wu Tang clan.

What’s news?

Ok, now that’s out of the way, let’s get into what you’re really here to read. The Times ‘news‘ that Burson is a possible candidate for sale isn’t really news. It had been eluded to previously in coverage. Coming in as a new CEO to WPP, it was inevitable would take an all-up strategic review.

Executives in the group have also discussed potential disposals as part of the new strategy, with some suggesting that Burson, its PR agency, would be the easiest to consider for sale given it sits separately from the three other divisions. – WPP to overhaul creative agency structure in strategic rethink | Financial Times (February 9, 2026)

The real news was that WPP appointed Goldman Sachs to do the work and that Burson reported a 6% decline in revenue in 2025.

The shape of the new WPP has been becoming clear for a number of months.
- WPP Production was basically the same direction of travel as Hogarth with a new brand. Hogarth was a new brand in itself, and didn’t have the depth of brand equity that Young & Rubican (Y&R Brands) or J Walter Thompson (JWT) had.
- WPP Open – AI stuff. Some of which is ‘self-service’ to tap into smaller clients and some of which seems to sit in WPP Production.
- WPP Media – which seems to be a rebrand of GroupM, like WPP Production it makes complete sense.
- WPP Creative – puts the creative brands under one line item where it used to be under Y&R Brands, JWT, Ogilvy etc. The past structure was as much down to WPP’s history of acquisition as it was to strategy. Much of this work had been done under Mark Read, this seemed to be as much about cleaning up the accounting processes as anything else. PR agencies would nominally fit underneath.
Why would WPP sell Burson?

A successful sale of Burson would provide WPP with funds to use elsewhere. This could fulfil two purposes; reducing debt or reinvesting in WPP’s business and technology transformation. Burson is a business that could be packaged up, sold to the right buyer or floated in a public offering.

The downsides would be a loss of integrated pitch power, and a smaller global footprint for back-office resources.

Obviously a few questions come up about who would be a buyer and would WPP want to spend the time listing Burson as a separate business?

It also makes strategic sense

When I worked at WPP, the PR agencies outside of Ogilvy weren’t integrated very tightly to their creative agency counterparts. You had a similar distance between the likes of Golin and McCann Erickson at IPG too. So the loss of integrated pitch power less than it would at first appear.

PR is an umbrella term for two broad functions, marketing communications and management functions. Management functions would include:
- Internal communications including around change management.
- Legal and compliance, for instance around financial communications for a public company.
- Stakeholder engagement including the investor community, local communities and government.
That isn’t an exhaustive list but it covers the major areas. There is more synergy between these areas and management consultancies than there are with WPP’s offerings. WPP has already sold FGS last year. FGS is a financial communications specialist.

The ‘management functions’ is more of a boutique offering and can come with risks as Bell Pottinger found out to their cost.

It’s arguably even more risky in a volatile political environment that yo-yos between different forms of political populism.

The other side of PR: marketing communications is earned media. That side of PR has been shaken up by several factors:
- Decline in the mainstream media.
- Search, generative AI and social algorithms as tastemakers.
- The creator economy.
- Brand media: led by the technology industry who published their news directly via blog posts.
In the past creative agencies thought about talkability, which was earned impact from advertising creative. Now creative agencies think about campaigns even more in terms of earned impact, including earned first approaches and WPP agency Ogilvy has managed to integrate its PR function into this process.

Specialist agencies tap into the creator economy and it’s been well documented by senior leaders in PR like Stephen Waddington how the PR industry missed the SEO opportunity.

PR agencies have looked to redefine themselves. The world’s largest PR firm, Edelman calls themselves a ‘global communications firm’ to help it position itself against management consultancies and advertising agencies.

The question WPP would have been asking themselves would have been: do they really need Burson when a lot of its function is now being done by media and creative agencies?

What does Burson gain or lose from leaving WPP, one way or the other?

Burson and its previous constituent agencies have been part of a conglomerate for the past quarter of a century that wasn’t focused on their business. WPP’s former CEO Sir Martin Sorrell used to talk about WPP primarily being a ‘media investment’ business for its clients. Helping them make the most effective, efficient investments in advertising for its clients.

Burson could be allowed to chart its own course, with less constraints put upon the business.

Burson would lose access to shared services over time, having to reorganise:
- IT support
- Offices
- Time-tracking
- Finance
- Employee and at least some client contracts
- New business prospecting
- Client contracts where the work is shared with WPP agencies
Over time Burson could rebuild partnerships and capabilities that it would have previously had through WPP.

There is a bigger question about whether the natural consequence of the structural bifurcation of modern PR into ‘management’ and ‘marketing communications’ specialists leaves room for a large full service generalist agency like Burson.

The industry itself is splitting rapidly between highly specialised management consultancy style operations handling the C-suite, and earned-first creative shops driving marketing communications. The traditional, full-service generalist model that Burson and its ancestors helped invent is finding it harder to operate in the middle ground. For example, Edelman, the PR industry’s bellwether fell below the $1 billion fee income mark in 2024, a 5% global decline.

If the world’s largest PR firm is struggling to make the integrated generalist model work, it may be that the model itself might be broken?

Who may want to buy Burson?

Private equity (including supporting a management team buyout)

I think that Burson would be a tough sell for an informed private equity (PE) firm. PE firms tend to look for business with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over 10%.

Here are some estimates that are why I came to this conclusion and I may be wrong.

Global Industry CAGR (2024–2030) is projected at 6.1% to 6.4%, although some aggressively optimistic estimates suggest up to 10.5%. That is based around assumptions on digital transformation and AI-driven services being fully integrated.

Looking at historic data from PRovoke Media’s global top 250 PR firms (2015 – 2023), CAGR was typically between 3.5% and 5%. These numbers maybe a bit optimistic due to currency fluctuations. (During CoVID, 2020 was flat and there was a sharp rebound in 2021.)

Burson’s constituent agencies BCW and H+K were running somewhere around 3.5 – 4% CAGR.

The outliers are AxiCom and ASDA’A who are Burson’s tech specialist brand and its Middle East agency presence – both operating in high growth sectors. They had CAGR somewhere between 12 – 14%.

This is the reason why PE has focused on specialists in the healthcare area or financial communications like FGS Global where the growth rate and margins are higher than normal.

Given the length of time that Burson has been within WPP, the consolidation that the business has been through merging:
- Burson-Marsteller
- Cohn & Wolfe
- Hill and Knowlton (H+K)
- JeffreyGroup
WPP likely trimmed out any organisational ‘fat’ which leaves little if any efficiency gains to be made by an acquiring PE firm.

When these firms were all separate it’s not like WPP were generous at the best of times. I heard allegations of bonuses either cancelled , or like pay rises constantly pushed out as aggressive cash management and cost reduction with junior and mid-level staff taking the brunt of this process.

Another PR agency network

Another PR agency network purchasing Burson may gain some operational efficiencies by de-duplicating the back office business processes from finance to HR departments.

But given that Burson is the world’s number two agency by fee income according to Provoke Media and PR Week; it is unlikely to be acquired by another PR network.

If the current number one Edelman bought them, they would run into antitrust issues and this would put them on the radar of the Trump administration in the US. Given the progressive leaning content of their Trust Barometer research, Edelman may end up creating its own business crisis.

Omnicom are likely too wrapped up in consolidating their purchase of Interpublic to attempt it. Even if they did make an offer, WPP may not be inclined to sell to a direct rival.

Publicis and Havas both have their focus on larger growth opportunities elsewhere and PR are much smaller parts of their business.

Most of the rest of the largest global agencies in the PR industry are either industry specialists like Real Chemistry and Invizio Evoke (health), FGS Global, APCO and Brunswick (financial communications) or national champions like Germany’s mc Group.

Conducting a leveraged buyout (LBO)of Burson would be unattractive due to the cost of debt servicing versus Burson’s CAGR. So this would make financing for a management buyout (MBO) challenging too.

Spin out or spin-in

From a PR agency perspective Burson has a good quality management team at the top. Someone like Corey duBrowa, who has previously worked at major corporates like Google and Starbucks. If the business was spun off or floated like Next15 Group, it could make sense on the London Stock Exchange.

Retail investors would be likely to give the best return for WPP. However, an IPO would take a major effort and a good deal of time to make happen that doesn’t feel like the kind of cadence that the WPP Elevate28 plan / platform wants to move at.

A spin-in might make some sense. Merge Burson with a publicly listed company (for instance Next15 or Stagwell) and then WPP sell down their shares over time. WPP maybe able to securitise its shares in such a way that it gets its (diminished) return upfront and a financial partner gradually sells down the shares with a view to making a profit on the money it paid WPP versus the price it gets on the stock market.

Clients get a vote too

Clients get a vote too. If the future of Burson affects client team morale, capacity or make-up they are likely to head for the door. The agency intellectual capital is their practitioners.

We saw a client exodus happen during the protracted acquisition of IPG by Omnicom with 3.5 percent drops in year-on-year revenue and peaked as high as 10% on a quarterly basis in markets like Australia.

Maintaining the client base will require a swift disposal process that doesn’t have Burson people keeping one eye on LinkedIn and the jobs section of PR Week or Ragan PR Daily.

Omnicom is desperate to rejuvenate its business and stealing unhappy Burson clients would be an easy win. Publicis is a high-performing group of agencies already and boutique shops live for ‘giant-killing’ new business pitches. Havas had a healthy PR business that would provide an alternative for any unhappy Burson clients.

The Human Cost of Structural Change

The current speculation surrounding Burson reflects a broader structural shift across the industry. For the professionals within the agency, many of whom have spent years managing complex briefs for major clients, this period of uncertainty will be unsettling.

Burson’s current position is not a reflection on the capability of its staff. It is the logical outcome of the continuing bifurcation of modern PR.

The sector is dividing between specialist management consultancies advising the C-suite and agile creative shops leading marketing communications.

The traditional generalist model, is finding the middle ground smaller and tougher than it used to be.

WPP’s wider strategy is now firmly anchored in technology and integrated creative solutions.

Operating independently or with private equity backing, Burson would have the operational freedom to determine its exact shape in this new market. Stepping away from a holding company structure is sometimes the clearest route to finding the necessary focus. The talent remain in place; the immediate requirement is a business model aligned with current market realities.
April 23, 2026
Rewatching Wong Kar wai
My love of films by Wong Kar wai came at a time of changing media. In the early 2000s I watched the films the first time after I got a portable multi-region DVD player and there had been a massive surge in video labels including Artificial Eye and Tartan publishing arthouse titles. This provided a great cost-effective way to explore and experience world cinema and I gravitated towards Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.

I was already familiar with traditional martial arts films and the ‘gun fu’ of John Woo. Wong Kar wai was Hong Kong’s answer to French new wave auteurs.

Around the same time, I ended up dating someone who lived in Hong Kong when we bonded over Faye Wong’s performance in Chungking Express. In a moment of delicious irony, I got to watch Wong Ka wai’s one ‘western’ film My Blueberry Nights while staying in Hong Kong.

While Wong Ka wai’s filmography wasn’t the reason why I moved to Hong Kong, but it was a reason why I moved to city and had the privilege of living there for a while.

This time around I was working my way through Criterion’s World of Wong Kar wai boxset which had been bought for my birthday during COVID time.

The Wong Kar wai boxset contains:
- As Tears Go By
- Days of Being Wild
- Chungking Express
- Fallen Angels
- Happy Together
- In The Mood for Love
- 2046
As Tears Go By

As Tears Go By was released in 1988. It is one of Wong Ka wai’s most conventional films from a Hong Kong perspective. Andy Lau plays the protagonist Wah, a triad soldier. Wong borrowed from the plot line in of Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Streets in terms of the story revolving around dynamic of two friends, one of whom is irresponsible. It’s a great stylish film, but if you told me that it had been made by Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark or Johnnie To, I’d have believed you. Hong Kong cinema audiences loved it and it would be another 25 years before Wong made another film as popular with local cinema goers.

Days of Being Wild

1990’s Days of Being Wild is often considered by some to be part of an informal trilogy, the others being In The Mood for Love and 2046. Stylistically it features love, loss, similar pacing, the use of inner narratives and experiments with colour. Thematically they are sensitive to the passage of time and have a vice-like hold on emotional memory. But the threads between the characters aren’t really bought together until the next film in the trilogy. Tony Leung’s character and is given the name of ‘Gambler’ is only wordlessly introduced right at the end of Days of Being Wild. He only becomes known as Chow Mo wan in the next film: In The Mood for Love.

Leslie Cheung was ideally cast as a lost, rootless, self-absorbed drifter Yuddy in the film. Yuddy has a hole at the centre of his being that he is unable to fill. Like many dislocated Chinese in Hong Kong between the civil war and the cultural revolution he drifts.

Yuddy is described as a legless bird, only touching down with death. Critics have interpreted this as pre-1997 handover anxiety. An article published on the Hong Kong Film Critics Society website described it for me best

At the time, they were echoes of Hong Kongers’ sentiments under the looming 1997 deadline. Leslie Cheung, who has a love-hate relationship with his foster mother and after a failed mission to find his biological mother, drifts in self-imposed exile, is a metaphor for the city caught between the two sovereign states of China and England.

Set in the 60s, the film is filled with signifiers of nostalgia (props, costumes, music, scenery). Reminiscence is but a lament that the good of the present will not last. And Days of Being Wild is but an elegy for a Hong Kong caught between 1989 and 1997.

The film follows Yuddy and the trail of emotional wreckage he leaves in his wake as he looks to track down his biological mother.

Secondary threads follow Su Li zhen, played by Maggie Cheung and Carrie Lau’s performance as Leung Fung ying. Both of whom where Yuddy’s transient love interests.

There is a scene where Yuddy looks to obtain an American passport and something about Cheung’s movement and the casual violence reminded me of Michael Madsen’s Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs released three years later. While Mr Blonde is nihilistic, he lacks the duality of Cheung’s character.

Leslie Cheung gives a fantastic performance on screen and his tragic death 13 years later was a serious blow to Hong Kong film-making.

Days of Being Wild wasn’t well received by Hong Kong cinema goers at the time, despite being well regarded by film critics everywhere. This adds to Wong Kar wai’s reputation as an auteur streets ahead of the local audience. Which was a view I bought into the first time around.

Having watched it again years later, I have some hypotheses as to why it didn’t do well.
- While the dislocation and drifting reflected life for many in early 1960s Hong Kong, it didn’t match the go-go economy and Lion Rock can-do spirit of Hong Kongers in the following three decades. Younger audiences wouldn’t be able to relate to it in the same way. Cinema audiences tend to be younger than the general population, so that disconnect makes a degree of sense.
- After the Sino-British joint declaration was signed in 1984, a pre-handover anxiety hung over Hong Kong. KMT supporting newspapers gradually closed down or pivoted their editorial style. Astronaut families became commonplace with upper middle class children based outside the city in Vancouver or Australia while their parents made money in the run up to handover due to the go-go environment of the time. The second passport, gave the family a bolt hole in case things went wrong after China took over. Local Hong Kong cinema goers wanted the escapism of action films, gambling movies and comedy.
- It is very different in pace as a film compared to its high-octane peers at the time from the likes of John Woo. This time I got to see the original Hong Kong trailer of Days of Being Wild – and could understand how you could go into the cinema expecting something with much more pace rather than the dream-like experience much of Days of Being Wild gives you.
- The ending came abruptly and without context.
Chungkung Express

1994’s Chungking Express is two locations and views of modern Hong Kong. Trading hub Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui and the Midnight Express takeaway restaurant in Lan Kwai Fong. While it is a romantic comedy of sorts and varies in pace, it also has the qualities of what we now expect in a Wong Kar wai film. The focus on time, distance and emotional memory – but with a much lighter touch than Days of Being Wild.

The film is anthology of two stories with retail worker Faye being the one serendipitous point of connection that holds both stories together.

Takeshi Kaneshiro plays alongside fellow Taiwanese actress Bridget Lin in the first story. He is estranged from his girlfriend May relying on calls to her parents and tins of pineapple which is her favourite food.

In the second story tells of how Cop 663, played by Tony Leung is left by his air stewardess girlfriend and acquires a stalker while getting over his old love.

Both stories caught the urban energy of 1990s Hong Kong and resonated better with audiences. What is more remarkable is how fast the film was made in an improvisational way with guerrilla film making techniques. Its looseness was by design as Wong tried to mirror Haruki Murakami’s writing style on screen. The film was shot in a two-week break from editing Ashes of Time.

The film brought Faye Wong to an international audience and cemented Wong Kar wai’s arthouse credentials.

The film feels very now in terms of its style and even the use of old technology like camcorders and pagers on screen doesn’t pull you out of the film in the way I might have expected.

Fallen Angels

1995’s Fallen Angels was a surprise to me the first time I watched it. In some ways it goes back to As Tears Go By in its exploration of Hong Kong’s organised crime world. You have Wong Kar wai’s use of loose narrative, colour, tight spaces and urban energy.

Compared to As Tears Go By it’s a slower paced film. It makes what now comes across as innovative use of close up wide angle photography that makes it look as if its shot on an iPhone decades before the modern iPhone came out. It also feels computer game-like in the action sequences. I can also understand why it has been compared to music videos in terms of style. Parts of the action sequence reminded me of Point Break in terms of the camera viewpoint. While it feels ‘intimate’ because of its claustrophobic shots, local cinema audiences didn’t relate to Fallen Angels.

There is a duality to the film. Takeshi Kaneshiro plays Police Officer Ho Chi moo badge number 223 in Chungking Express. In Fallen Angels he is Hoo Chi moo, convict number 223.

There are wider Wong Kar wai touches, in mid 20th century artefacts from 1960s Hong Kong architecture to the Enicar illuminated wall clock in the assassins base.

(Enicar was a historic Swiss watch brand that was best known across Asia and China. The brand name is now owned by Wah Ming Hong who had been their distributor in China since the 1930s. One of my first memories of Hong Kong was giant building wrapping adverts for Enicar and another former Swiss, now Hong Kong watch company Solvil et Titus).

Watching it this time, I had a nagging feeling that something had changed and sure enough when I searched online. I found out that the film had been extensively cropped shot by shot and recoloured by Wong Kar wai in 2020, not always for the better.

Happy Together

Happy Together was released in 1997 and is still a highly regarded example of New Queer Cinema alongside the like of Querelle.

As a work out of Hong Kong it’s remarkable. Hong Kong as a society is conservative and there is a don’t ask, don’t tell aspect to the treatment of the LGBTQI community in Hong Kong. Legislation is more advanced than Hong Kong society at large.

Leslie Cheung was an ideal protagonist known for being a champion of the avant-garde and having on-screen characters that experimented in different forms and levels of masculinity.

Happy Together‘s themes of displacement, exile, and the repeated line “Let’s start over” mirrored loneliness, heartbreak, the collective uncertainty and “fretful wanderlust” of Hong Kongers at the time. The film came out in Hong Kong just two months prior to the handover of Hong Kong to China.

Happy Together was released with a Category III rating, meaning only those 18 and above can watch it. Primarily this was down to Hong Kong’s greater latitude for violence rather than sex on-screen. Wong Kar wai’s eye and treatment on camera means that Argentina feels rather like Hong Kong in the film.

In The Mood For Love

For many people, 2000’s In The Mood For Love is the gateway drug to Wong Kar wai films. I think that the Cantonese title ‘Flower-like Years’, ‘the prime of one’s youth’ suits the film better. It’s the second film Wong’s informal trilogy, after Days of Being Wild.

The contrast in pacing between In The Mood For Love and the previous film mirrored the move from frantic kinetic energy of colonial Hong Kong living on borrowed time to an oppressive study in stillness focused on longing for the past post-handover. Wong admitted in interviews that the hotel room number, 2046, where the protagonists get together to write represented the final year of Hong Kong’s ‘guaranteed‘ autonomy. The Shanghainese dialect spoken, outfits and food reflected Hong Kongers nostalgia for the post-civil war era of migration to Hong Kong as time of pain and hope.

We are properly introduced to Tony Leung’s Chow Mo-wan character. Su Li zhen, played by Maggie Cheung adds the real line of continuity. We know it’s 1962, and probably at least a few years since Days of Being Wild. On one level their fortunes have improved, Su now works as a secretary for a shipping company; Chow is a journalist. They are both unhappily married and find solace in each other’s company.

It’s like David Lean’s Brief Encounter but with the colour and latent emotion dialled up through copious amounts of hallucinogen. The loneliness, missed connections, the weight of time, regret, longing and rootlessness feel even more intense in this film than any of Wong’s previous films. The also a sharp contrast with the licentious and violent elements in Wong’s previous films.

I remember watching it the first time and being blown away by it visually without taking in the plot, performance and nuance layer throughout. I then revisited my old DVD copy several times later on.

Wong lays out their collective journey of discovery in finding out that their respective partners are having an affair. This builds the closeness and tension them, as does the martial arts serial that they write together.

(This always struck me as a nod the popularity of Hong Kong based authors like Liang Yusheng and Louis Cha who worked as newspaper journalists, before going on to write serials published in newspapers and magazines. Eventually their works would be adopted in Hong Kong films including Wong Kar wai’s own The Eagle Shooting Heroes and Ashes of Time; and TV series in Hong Kong, Taiwan and communist China).

In The Mood For Love redefined the way male main actor roles were portrayed in Hong Kong cinema allowing greater character depth than was previously the case with gun fu, wuxia and action comedies. It gave the post-handover Hong Kong film industry a much-needed creative shot in the arm before the ‘China-Hong Kong’ joint ventures finally bled it dry.

In The Mood For Love seemed to be the ground zero for Hong Kong mid 1960s nostalgia, such as the G.O.D ‘Bing Sutt Corner’ redesign of the Starbucks branch on Duddell Street in the central district of Hong Kong. Others got in on the act, 7-Eleven released a set of ‘Old Hong Kong’ phone charms.

Writing this post, I went back to find out what I had written about the phone charms.

There is a wider trend of nostalgia in the city which 7 Eleven Hong Kong is tapping into.

It is interesting because it reflects a widely held view that the bright new future offered by mainland China isn’t bright, attractive or desirable. This will likely cause trouble in Hong Kong for China in the future; if it rolls out from the cultural zeitgeist into political aspects of Hong Kong life.

There are times when I wish I was wrong.

Nothing jarred from memory when I rewatched In The Mood For Love, but I had forgotten the documentary footage of President De Gaulle visiting Cambodia near the end.

2046

After In The Mood For Love, 2046 follows Chow Mo wan as he attempts to get Su Li zhen out of his system. The story also connects with Days of Being Wild with Carina Lau’s character still being heart-broken over the death of Yuddy, years later.

There is a line in Tony Leung’s monologue that encapsulates 2046 the central plot premise really well.

“Love is all a matter of timing, it’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. If I’d lived in another time or place then my story might have had a very different ending” – Tony Leung’s character Chow Mo-wan in 2046

2046 captured post-Handover disillusionment, a community that realises its own ephemeral nature. Hong Kong’s specialness appears as suffering according to Stephen Teo – and I think he got it right.

…a visually ravishing work that’s downright apocalyptic in its suffocating sense of dread and despair. – David Pountain, Little White Lies

I finished the boxset, drained in a good way, but also disappointed, not in Wong Kar wai’s work but in the Hong Kong it now exists in. As it was once my home, I felt broken.
April 9, 2026
Pilot Parker & more inspiration

This inspiration post is a mix of things that caught my eye from Pilot Parker to HyperCard.

Pilot Parker

Pilot Parker is Malaysia Airlines mascot. I was familiar with him from the inflight duty-free catalogue. The inspiration for the film came from a moment shared by a young passenger who had flown with Malaysia Airlines. After her trip, she sent the airline a hand-drawn illustration of Pilot Parker along with a letter describing how the mascot brought her comfort during the journey. So the brand moved Pilot Parker from souvenir to fluent object.

Lemon – lime facetime call.

Apple had a week of things including more affordable devices (iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo) in a green-yellow colour. The company deleted all their TikTok account contents and then posted this video.

@apple
hello?
♬ original sound – apple

20-somethings in the ad industry lost their minds, feeling seen and considering it revolutionary that large brands have humour and can navigate culture. They then filled LinkedIn with insightful posts to let all the oldster millennials know.

Just leaving this one here, in case anyone notices. The lesson of the story is that everything old is new, especially the heuristic about being part of culture.

Retrospective on HyperCard

HyperCard was a powerful idea that didn’t have its time. I used it to run lab experiments during a brief time with Corning prior to my going to college. This video goes into real depth about what we missed.

Voice recognition is older than you think

I found this 1958 film of Victor Scheinman, at the time a high school student. He invented a solution that provided speech to text via a typewriter. It isn’t that far away from the speech recognition that I had on mobile phones from my Ericsson T39 through to my current iPhone.

In his adult life Scheinman worked with AI pioneer Marvin Minsky and worked in the field of robotics in academia and the private sector. Scheinman went on to work with General Motors and Yaskawa Electric Corporation. Right up to his death Scheinman was an associate professor who still consulted at Stanford University.

Scheinman’s high school experiment shows both how far we’ve come and yet how little we’ve progressed in comparison to the hype.

Think with Google & Sir Martin Sorrell

Think with Google interviewed Sir Martin Sorrell who was entertaining and consistent on themes he has been talking for the past few years. I found it interesting that he suspects marketing science is ‘over’. I don’t agree with him in this respect because software changes faster than wetware, but Sorrell instead has the CFO view within clients.

Yet the favourite campaigns that he worked on were his work at Saatchi & Saatchi before he built WPP.

Here’s the British Airways ‘Manhattan Landing‘ campaign from 1983 that Sir Martin named as the favourite campaign that he worked on.

More marketing related content here.

April 4, 2026
March 2026 newsletter – (32) buckle my shoe
March 2026 introduction – (32) buckle my shoe

By some miracle, I have managed to make it to issue 32. Yes this is late, my excuse was reading The Persian, more on that below. In the jargon of the bingo hall 32 came up as ‘buckle my shoe’.

https://flic.kr/p/w8zyP

As I wrote this down I was reminded of a vivid memory from my early childhood. I was staying with my Granny on the family farm in rural Ireland. I would have been pre-school, maybe three years old.

Like a magpie I was attracted to shiny things, and she had a pair of shoes with gold coloured decorative elements on them. They were horseshoe-shaped buckles, but didn’t serve any function beyond aesthetics.

I managed to remove one unintentionally, it didn’t seem to take any effort. I realised it shouldn’t be off the shoe, so I returned it to her in my mind, by posting it under the closed door of her bedroom.

I forgot about it. There was more important things to do like pat the friendly farm dog and feed soda bread crumbs from the breakfast table to the couple of coal tits that would show up at the back door after every meal.

Later on, the adults got in a state when the buckle was discovered missing and one of Granny’s best pairs of shoes were now ruined. I pointed out where I had put the buckle, but it was now nowhere to be found. The second buckle was slipped off the other shoe and both shoes matched again, no one outside the household was any the wiser until you read this.

Like the missing buckle we can often no longer return, but we can adapt and move forward by shedding extraneous items that hold us back.

Beyond bingo, 32 in Chinese sounds similar to easy growth, which is considered lucky across business, relationships and in one’s personal life. It also corresponds to perseverance or staying the course in the I Ching.

This month’s soundtrack to the newsletter is collated by The Found Sound Orchestra over on SoundCloud. Now that’s sorted, 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.

Things I’ve written.

Reflecting on the different archetypes of people that you meet in an advertising agency new business pitch and how to deal with them.

A roundup of everything from Chinese innovation to Anthropic’s disagreement with the US Department of Defense.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Wellness as an experiential aspect of luxury. It has become a luxury currency in its own right for both genders according to a new report by Karla Otto.
2. My friend Nigel Scott analysed the future of creative agencies. He thought that AI forced the agency break even point even higher, which impacts the rise of the independents.
3. The paradox of Gucci using generative AI to market slow luxury aesthetic / lifestyle.
4. International Women’s Day was marked by some sobering research on attitudes to gender equality in the UK. There was a generational aspect to it where younger cohorts men held more traditional views than other groups and optimism for their future prospects dropped.
5. Meta was found liable in two court cases. One was about the role of social platforms facilitating human trafficking. The second was being found liable due to creating an ‘addictive’ platform. Critics now have a roadmap to seek damages and drive design changes.
Books that I have read.

The Persian by David McCloskey – this isn’t the first book that I have read by David McCloskey, but the one that I most anticipated. Espionage novels have had a revival as the global war on terror (GWoT) wound down, Ukraine, the South China Sea and Iran wound up. The timing of the book was precipitous. It came out at the end of January and events started down their path in the Persian Gulf soon after.

The book is very cleverly written. The story told from multiple perspectives:
- A Mossad department head and his staff
- A prisoner held in an Iranian jail
- An Iranian mother
Yes you get the tension of a spy novel, but you also get the portrait of flawed human characters, acting and reacting to the terrible incidents around them. In this respect, it reminded me of what the Apple TV series Tehran tried to do. McCloskey manages to humanise his characters in a way that few authors in the genre beyond John le Carré and Mick Herron in his own way.

Things I have been inspired by.

Japanese porcelain brand Hataman Touen graced the tables of the Imperial Royal Household. Their classical techniques became relevant of the modern world thanks to a collaboration with Ghost In The Shell Standalone Complex anime.

The result was a limited edition model of the Tachikoma autonomous intelligent ‘tank’ that plays a prominent role in the show.

https://www.tiktok.com/@argos/video/7577699305818000662?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7612101813533623830

I am not a big fan of TikTok, but Argos have been killing it with their ‘stockroom rave‘. The nod to raving in working class culture for over half a century from the speed-fuelled Wigan Casino all-nighters to the Boiler Room sessions today. Less so now that I work in offices, but before going to college banging tunes on Sony ghetto-blaster got me through shifts in a McDonald’s, a clothing factory and a plant hire repair workshop. And doing it all with a dash of humour.

My friend Dan Ilett‘s newsletter The Executive Summary fufils the old strategist maxim of being interesting first, being right second. Dan manages to pull both off more often than not, but he is always interesting. Sign up here.

Chart of the month.

This month due to the confluence of a client project that never happened and the latest report drop by Morgan Stanley in association with LuxeConsult, I looked into the Swiss luxury watch industry.

A few interesting trends emerge:
- Independents such as Patek Philippe and Rolex have successfully held off large luxury conglomerates LVMH and Richemont.
- Swatch Group has become a donor of market share to the other main players.
- The K-shaped market can be seen in the relative performance of Richemont’s brands. Vacheron Constantin and Cartier outperformed while IWC, Panerai and Jaeger-LeCoultre laboured in a tightening market.
- The sector-wide -3% CAGR (compound annual growth rate), was driven by economics as much as smart watches. Smart watches will exert less pressure moving forwards as they were kept and worn for longer by users.
Things I have watched.

I rewatched the original 1995 Ghost In The Shell animated film. I went in expecting for me to be thinking about the future of AI, instead the idea of the puppet master and his agent reminded me of the impact of social media and the influence that it impacts on consumers. There is one scene where a dust bin wagon driver is being questioned and is told that all his memories are false, he had been taken in by a false life. It spoke to the way people become ‘red pilled’.

Useful tools.

If like me, you have found that no matter what you do with your brightness button, your Mac’s screen is lacking, fear not Vivid is here. You don’t have to splurge on an XDR display to make it pop and keep the colour balance, Vivid is an app that doubles the brightness your display can achieve.

I am a long time fan of RSS reader Newsblur. The apps for it have recently undergone a major redesign including new features to make it even more intelligent and useful. In particular, I am really excited about a new feature that turns any website into an RSS feed that can be followed which the call Webfeeds.

We can have a larger debate about how web developers, designers and site owners have taken a backward step by not using RSS or Atom. WordPress comes with RSS built in, so you have to actively shut it down. Instead, Instead I’d like to celebrate the major level engineering that Samuel Clay and the team at Newsblur managed to achieve in developing Webfeeds as a highly usable feature within Newblur.

YouTube Search Fixer is a browser plugin for Chrome and Firefox that allows you to customise search results on YouTube. Doing research and don’t want to get music videos, or avoid related searches clutter – then you don’t have to.

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.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my March 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the joys of spring along with chocolate eggs.

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.
March 31, 2026