Search results for: “"Johnnie To"”

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
January 2026 newsletter
January 2026 introduction – (30) the dirty Gertie edition

I am now at issue 30, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘dirty gertie’. This phrase was the nickname given in the 1920s to a statue called by La Délivrance by French sculptor Émile Guillaume.

The statue was created to celebrate the German army having being stopped before Paris in World War 1. It was originally called La Victoire – there is a matching statue in Nantes, France.

1960s student activists claimed that you shouldn’t trust anyone over the age of 30, making a virtue of ageism. While activists were deeply suspicious, 30 in Cantonese is considered to be lucky as the number three sounds like alive or life.

It might be winter outside, but it doesn’t need to be winter in your head thanks to Graeme Park’s Best of 2025 part 1 which is two and a half hours of goodness. Now we have a sound track, 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.

Each year, I try and write an account of year as it happens. It provides a perspective on what appeared important at the time rather than in retrospect. Here’s the one I did for 2025.

The Dot LLM Era came out of my thinking about the massive expenditure in building infrastructure and the computing power needed by AI services like OpenAI and Anthropic, asking how it will be paid for and what it means for for business, consumers, investors and technologies.

There was so much happening from childhood beauty product usage alarming dermatologists to corporate and national moves in AI sovereignty. So I captured some of the most interesting of them here.

Books that I have read.

Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything. Mazzucato’s work was reflected in the Labour Party’s economic manifesto during the 2024 general election. The book does a good job of diagnosing the current challenges that the UK economy faces at the present time. More on the book here.

How to Write a Good Advertisement: a short course in copywriting by Victor O. Schwab. During the CoVID lockdown, I picked up several books on my craft. This was one of them. Schwab wrote this book in 1962, when his audience would have been predominantly writing advertising copy for campaigns run predominantly in newspapers – but all of the principles in the book remain solid. More on the book here.

Things I have been inspired by.

Every time I get a brief that defines an audience as a generation my heart sinks a bit for several reasons. Which is why I was glad to read this Ipsos View Point and share it as widely as possible. Generational Marketing: Breaking free from stereotypes provides research on the nuances missed by a generational approach, how we differ by age cohort and life stage, alongside what brings us together as common challenges.

While it won’t get as much ink as Christmas or Super Bowl adverts the CIA kicked off January with another video aimed at recruiting Chinese agents. They advised them to use a VPN and Tor browser to get in touch with them online.

Chart of the month.

After I came back to London after working on various brands including Colgate in Asia, I noticed that all the Colgate adverts followed a standard formula. It puzzled me: the ads were distinctive by their ‘undistinctiveness’. They had no emotion and a limited number of brand cues beyond name checks and a pack shot or two.

If like me, you’ve ever wondered why Colgate toothpaste adverts (in Europe at least) always seem to be based around a dentist or dental nurse (who may, or may not be a generative AI) character, then Ipsos Veracity Index 2025, may have the answer.

The Ipsos Veracity Index, is a great piece of longitudinal research launched in 1983. It does an annual poll studying change in public trust towards leading professions in Britain. Much of the headlines for this year was the low trust position scored by influencers, with just 6% of people generally trusting them to tell the truth.

I think that number has a number of problems with it, to do with the phrase general which would invite them to think about creators they don’t follow at least as much as those that they do follow. Secondly, not all influencer types are supposed to be trusted be it being videos on e-gaming play, humour and general ‘banter’ or shock jock-type content.

As Ipsos themselves noted, there was a tension between the declared trust level with the amount of news consumption that now happens on social channels from influencers.

Getting back to the Colgate question, the answer is at the top of the table. Healthcare professionals and technical experts are at the most trusted professions in the UK.

Things I have watched.

The TV schedule was terrible over the Christmas period and there were only so many reruns of Jessie Stone that even my Dad can sit through. So I entertained him with a mix of streamed films, old VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond directed by Hélène Cattet and impressed the hell out of me. At its heart it’s a mystery full of illusion, delusion and deception. It oscillates between two timelines one from the late sixties on and the second as an elderly version of the protagonist in the present day. In his day, the protagonist had been a Francophone James Bond-type figure, but darker like Fleming’s novels rather than the version that we see on screen. There are also hints of modern French historical figures like Alfred Sirven and Jean-Claude Veillard. The film has a lot of French new wave motifs particularly at its beginning. I was reminded of Alain Delon’sTraitement de choc , Diabolik and the André Hunebelle directed OSS 117 series of films in the mid-1960s.

Bubblegum Crash – no that isn’t a typo. Bubblegum Crash was a follow on from the Bubblegum Crisis manga and OVA (original video animation – made for direct to video distribution without being broadcast or shown in a cinema first) anime series. I had these on VHS tape at my parent’s house and it was fantastic revisiting them decades later. Bubblegum Crash is less serious and the artwork isn’t as good as the original series, but it’s still great cyberpunk fiction.

It felt surprisingly fresh, wealth inequality, get rich schemes, large corporations behaving badly, an openly gay police officer, autonomous machines from robots to cars and normalised smartphone usage.

All this from an animated series that was produced in 1991, at this time robots were stuck in car plants, AI was image stabilisation in the latest high-end camcorders and handheld mobile phones were over 20cm long in use. Cellphones were only starting to become less than a kilogram in weight with the launch of Motorola’s MicroTAC in 1989.

Detective vs Sleuths – a Johnnie To-adjacent film that a friend in Hong Kong gifted to me. The film was directed by Wai Ka-fai who collaborated with To and co-founded production company Milkyway Image together. Detective vs Sleuths feels thematically and stylistically similar to Mad Detective which Wai co-directed with To in 2007. That similarity brought me back to happier days flying on Cathay Pacific, sipping Hong Kong-style milk tea and watching Mad Detective soon after it had came out for the first time on the airplane entertainment system.

Without spoiling the plot, old cold cases are having new light shone on them by a series of deaths. Sean Lau plays a Nietzsche-quoting former detective with his own sanity in question.

Production-wise, the film was shot in 2018, was in post-production until 2019 and finally released after the worst of CoVID was over in 2022. If you are a passionate Hong Kong film watcher, then you will notice the similarities with Mad Detective; but Detective vs Sleuths still holds up as a really enjoyable inventive film with a number of surprises for the audience.

Useful tools.

Kinopio – quick lightweight service similar to Miro and MilanNote.

Clean Links – for iPhone, iPad and Mac cleans out tracking codes from URLs when you share them, for instance in a Slack conversation.

Not a tool per se, but a technique that started on Chromium browsers and is now more widely supported, scroll to text fragments. Appending to the end of a URL:

#:~:text=startWord,endWord

When someone clicks on the link they are guided directly to a highlighted section on the page, rather than having to search or guess at what you meant. It isn’t perfect, but it’s rather good.

Capacities – an interesting knowledge management and research app similar to Notion, Mendeley, Yojimbo or DEVONThink.

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. Most recently, 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.

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 “wholehearted” strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my January 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 my charts of the month for 2025, in PowerPoint format that you can freely use in your own presentations.

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.
January 28, 2026
September 2025 newsletter
September 2025 introduction – (26) pick-and-mix edition

Where has the year gone? I am just thankful that we got a little bit of sun, given how fast and hard the autumn wind and rain came in this year. I am now at issue 26, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘pick and mix’.

When I was a child ‘pick-and-mix’ sweets were a way of getting maximum variety for the lowest amount of pocket money that I earned from chores. Woolworths were famous at the time for their pick and mix section, alongside selling vinyl records and cassettes. Woolworths disappeared from the UK high street during the 2008 financial crisis.

For Mandarin Chinese speakers 26 is considered ‘lucky’ given that it sounds similar to ‘easy flow’ implying easy wealth.

This month’s soundtrack has been a banging digital compilation put together by Paradisco and Disco Isn’t Dead featuring The Reflex, PBR Streetgang, Prins Thomas, J Kriv, Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66.

Right, 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.
- Decoding the complex and contradictory data around crime and its likely impact on consumer opinions.
- A post that took me too long to write about the favourite campaigns I had when on the jury of the PHNX awards.
- I missed sharing a post I wrote last month that built on the work of Rob Estreitinho on ideas for being a good strategist.
Books that I have read.
- I finished Moscow X by David McCloskey. (No plot spoilers). This is the second book my McCloskey after Damascus Station, which I read and enjoyed back in May last year. The book is like a more action-orientated American version of a LeCarré novel. The plot reminded me of LeCarré’s Single & Single and Our Kind of Traitor. McCloskey isn’t afraid to have strong female lead characters in his book.
- Y our Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall. Minshall is a professor at Cambridge and heads up the engineering department’s manufacturing research centre. Because of his mastery of the subject area, he manages to provide an exceptionally accessible primer in terms of what manufacturing is, how it happens and what it means. More about it here.
Things I have been inspired by.

Election-winning opacity in influencer relations

I have been following Taylor Lorenz‘ work since she became the beat reporter for online culture and technology at the Business Insider. Her article for Wired magazine on how the Democratic Party in the US is working with paid influencers makes for an interesting read.

What would be the norm in the commercial world about influencer transparency where there is a paid relationship – isn’t happening in politics.

Ok, why does this matter? The reason why I think this matters is that people who do their time in the trenches of a presidential election campaign have a clear path into a number of American agencies.

‘I’ve have won a victory for X candidate and can do the same for your brand’ has been a popular refrain for decades in agencies.

I have been in the room when senior American agency people have tried to convince Chinese companies to buy their services based on their success in marketing a candidate in an election using western social media channels. There was no sense of irony when this was awkwardly delivered as a possible solution for domestic market campaigns to marketing teams in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shanghai.

Bad habits will be brought into agencies and sold on to clients.

Chart of the month.

Kim Malcolm shared a great report done by Zappi and VaynerMedia looking at The State of Creative Effectiveness 2025. Two charts piqued my interest. The change in distinctiveness of advertising by age cohort.

The overall emotion that an advert evokes by age cohort.

Causality of these effects aren’t clear. Empirically, I know that great adverts still put a smile on the faces of people of all ages and can change brand choice, even in the oldest consumers.

I had more questions than answers. VaynerMedia thought that the answer should be cohort-specific campaigns. I am less sure, since brands tend to better within culture as a common point of truth for everyone. Also, I don’t believe in leaping to a solution until I understand the underlying ‘problem’.

I could understand a decline in novelty as people gain decades of life experience and will have seen similar creative executions before.

Are the adverts lacking a foundation in strong cultural insights and cues that would resonate with these older audience cohorts?

What I did notice is a correlation with the age profile in advertising agency staff compared to the general public and the point at which the drop-off to occurs. But correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation.

It’s concerning that advertising effectiveness declines in older audience cohorts as economic power skews older within the general population. This is likely to continue as millennials inherit wealth from their baby boomer relatives as they enter their 50s and 60s. Which makes the old marketer line about half of a consumers economic value is over by 35 seem hollow.

Things I have watched.

Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 1 and Border 2. In the GITS storyline this is a prequel to the original film. It follows how the eventual team comes together. The technology looks less fantastical and more prophetic each time I watch it. The animation is still spectacular.

Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 3 and Border 4. Following on from Border 1 and Border 2, this has Togusa and the Section 9 team following the same case from different ends – which eventually has Togusa joining Section 9 as its only unaugmented team member.

I bought up as many of the films I could in Johnnie To’s filmography after he criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview, which was likely to be the kiss of death to his film career. I finally got around to watching one of his best known films PTU and the series of Tactical Unit films that came from the same universe.

PTU: One of the paradoxes of Hong Kong is the prevalence of triad and corruption dramas, compared to the real life which whilst not crime and corruption free is much more staid. Hong Kong is as different from its cinematic counterpart, as the UK is to Richard Curtis’ films. PTU like Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is based around the search for a missing police pistol. PTU (police tactical unit) officers look to help out a detective from the OCTB (organised crime and triad bureau). While the film occurs over one night, it was actually shot over three years and is one of Johnnie To’s best known films. Shooting only at night, To provided the audience with a familiar, yet different, cinematic experience. The washed out colours of day time Hong Kong is replaced by vibrant signage and the sharp shadows defined by the street lighting. Officers walking with a street lamp lit Tom Lee music instrument store behind them, look like its from a John Ford scene in composition. Some of his tracking shots, due to the framing of photography and the distortions of the night give an almost Inception like feeling to the geography of Hong Kong streets, warping the horizon between buildings the night sky. PTU was successful internationally and then spawned, five further films from the same universe made in 2008 and 2009.

Tactical Unit: The Code was a one of a series of Tactical Unit sequels to Johnnie To’s PTU. In The Code several plot lines come together. The investigation of CCTV footage of officers beating up a triad , a police officer heavily in debt due to negative equity on his mortgage and a drug deal gone wrong. All this plays out in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong. When this film was made back in 2008, it would have been considered well done, but largely unremarkable. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.

Tactical Unit: Human Nature loses some of the cinematic feel of PTU. It’s not as masterful a film , BUT, the convoluted threads of the plot and the great cast who are now completely comfortable in their characters make it work well.

Tactical Unit: No Way Out. No Way Out starts with an impressive screne shot in Temple Street market. The film explores the Temple Street area of Kowloon and organised crime links to everything from cigarette smuggling to drugs.

Tactical Unit: Comrade in Arms is the penultimate in the series from the PTU universe of films. You still have the main cast of Hong Kong veterans Lam Suet, Simon Yam and Maggie Shiu. Plain clothes officer Lo Sa has been demoted to wearing a uniform and both Mike Ho and Sergeant Kat’s squads are still patrolling the Kowloon side of Victoria harbour. This sees the stars leave their usual urban beat and go into the hills of the New Territories after bank robbers. Much of it occurs in daylight, which sets it apart from the night time beat of PTU. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.

Tactical Unit: Partners. Partners is unusual in that it revolves around the challenges of the ethnic minorities that make up Hong Kong from romance fraud ensnaring filipina workers to discrimination against Indians and Nepalis. While some of the show happens during late on in the day, it still captures much of the night time feeling of the universe

2001 Nights is a 3D anime. While I admire the ambition and the technical expertise that went into the models, the characters as CGI fall down and distract from the storytelling. Also it felt weirdly like Space 1999 – and not in a good way.

Her Vengeance is a Hong Kong category III revenge movie filmed in 1988 that 88 Films recently release on Blu Ray. It borrows from another Hong Kong film in the early 1970s and I Spit On Your Grave. Despite being an low budget exploitation film it features a number of notable Hong Kong actors, probably because it was a Golden Harvest Production.

I found the film interesting because its opening was shot at Stanley Ho’s iconic Casino Lisboa in Macau. This was unusual because Hong Kong had lots of nightclubs that would have been fine for the protagonists management role without the hassle of the additional travel and government permissions. So we get a rare late 1980s snapshot of the then Portuguese colony.

When The Last Sword Is Drawn is a classic chambara (samurai sword-play) movie. It tells the complex story of a samurai, who unable to support his family on his meagre income as a school teacher and fencing master, turns his back on his clan and leaves to find work in Kyoto. Once in Kyoto he becomes embroiled in the battle between the declining Takagawa Shogunate and the Imperial Royal Family during the 19th century. Whilst the film does contain a lot of violence, it is used as a backdrop to the humanity of the main character and battles he faces between providing for his family and doing the honourable thing.

The plot is told through the recollections of others and finishes with the samurai’s youngest daughter getting ready to leave Japan with her husband and set up a doctor’s surgery in Manchuria (China).

Useful tools.

Playing Blu-Ray discs on a Mac

I have a Blu Ray player in my home theatre that enjoy using in lieu of subscribing to Netflix, which allows to me to explore more art house content than I can stream. Macgo Mac Blu Ray Player Pro gives your Mac the software capability that Steve Jobs wouldn’t.

One final thing, if you prefer to use Substack, you can now subscribe to this newsletter there.

The sales pitch.

I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my September 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Hallowe’en.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

Get in touch
September 26, 2025
PHNX awards jury interview

I am fortunate to be an awards juror for the second time. This is for the Adforum PHNX advertising awards which attracts entries from around the world.

As part of the process I responded to some interview questions. I hope that my old gaffer Tony Gresty appreciated my quoting of him decades later and was surprised that there wasn’t pushback about my assertion of a ‘post-social’ marketing era.

What motivates you to be part of the PHNX Jury, and what do you hope to bring to the judging process?

Before I worked in advertising, I served an apprenticeship in plant process engineering. My old gaffer who was responsible for me had a few sayings. One of which was practice sharpens skill. By being a judge, I hope that I am helping people within the industry around the world to sharpen their skill. Seeing great challenging work and asking myself how it fits the customer and client needs in turn, helps further sharpen my skill as a strategist. TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) altruist generosity?

PHNX has always been about celebrating creativity in all its forms. What new perspectives or disciplines do you think deserve more recognition in award shows today?

Strategy has the Effies, BUT its focus is larger than creativity with a major focus on efficiency and effectiveness rather the creative process. Strategy always provides the ‘assist’ with single-minded insight and creative JOTBD (job to be done), but is never the ‘goal scorer’ to use an American sports stats metaphor. I think that creativity is not only about the creative, but also the context where the creative is placed – which brings in the disciplines of project management’s orchestration, production’s craft and media planning. I think this is going to become far more important as we go towards a post-social era.

Which countries or regions do you think are leading the creative field right now? And which emerging markets should we look out for?

A really interesting question. Leading is probably the wrong phrase to use, but there are markets that are under-estimated. Thailand and the Philippines have well-deserved reputations for emotional storytelling. Year-after-year when I look at lunar new year adverts Malaysia hits well above its weight given the size of the market.

Japan has been consistently delighting advertising folk for the past five decades.

Probably a better question to ask me after I have been through this year’s award entries.

What trends or cultural shifts do you think will define the most impactful creative work this year?

With everything that’s going on, I think we’ll need more humour. Trends within the advertising industry are also leaning towards a better mix of formats. As an industry we over-index on social vs. attention, efficiency and effectiveness for large brands. So we’ve seen a renaissance in OOH amongst other formats.

There is also a return to basics: creative consistency, fluent objects, the power of storytelling and humour. Finally consumers are more interested in consuming more longer form audio and video content, so what a creative execution might look like I hope is very different.

If you could give one piece of advice to agencies and creatives submitting their work, what would it be?

Be single-minded in terms of category consideration. My biggest criticism of last year’s PHNX award entries was not about the quality of the work per se. Many of the entries had a given creative was put in for consideration for the wrong category. And it was the same entries doing it over-and-over again. If it isn’t relevant it’s just going to get ignored or get under the skin of the judges. In the same way that a poorly-placed ad that is slapped all over the place without consideration would have a similar effect in the real world.

Rant over: I wish everyone the best of luck, finally don’t be disheartened. All of the work was of a high standard, choosing winners is hard.

Which creative minds are inspiring you the most right now?

In the widest creative sense I am working my way through veteran Hong Kong film director Johnnie To‘s back catalogue; some of his works like Breaking News feel like exceptionally contemporary given our media environment. A couple of creatives using AI in a really smart way are Omar Karim aka @arthur_chance on instagram and the Dor Brothers. Agency work-wise VCCP’s immersive installation for Transport for London and a small Malaysian shop called Days Studios (whose bread-and-butter work is usually weddings!), yet, did a fantastic job producing a Chinese New Year ad for a cosmetic treatment clinic Aglow Studio – not what you’d call a big client yet it felt like a bigger production than many large brands. Go Google the ad ‘hiss of prosperity’ and watch it on YouTube.

It’s your last chance to enter for free here.

March 27, 2025
February 2025 newsletter
February 2025 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my February 2025 newsletter, I hope that your year of the snake has gotten off to a great start. This newsletter marks my 19th issue – which feels a really short time and strangely long as well, thank you for those of you who have been on the journey so far as subscribers to this humble publication. Prior to writing this newsletter, I found that the number 19 has some interesting connections.

In mandarin Chinese, 19 sounds similar to ‘forever’ and is considered to be lucky by some people, but the belief isn’t as common as 8, 88 or 888.

Anyone who listened to pop radio in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s would be familiar with Paul Hardcastle’s documentary sampling ’19’. The song mixed narration by Clark Kent and sampled news archive footage of the Vietnam war including news reports by read by Walter Cronkite. 19 came from what was cited as the average age of the soldier serving in Vietnam, however this is disputed by Vietnam veteran organisation who claim that the correct number was 22. The veteran’s group did a lot of research to provide accurate information about the conflict, overturning common mistakes repeated as truth in the media. It’s a handy reminder that fallacies and trust in media began way before the commercial internet.

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.
- Zing + more things – HSBC’s Zing payments system was shut down and was emblematic of a wider challenge in legacy financial institutions trying to compete against ‘fintech startups. I covered several other things as well including new sensor technology
- The 1000 Yen ramen wall is closing down family restaurants across Japan. A confluence of no consumer tolerance for price elasticity due to inflation driven ingredients costs is driving them to the wall. Innovation and product differentiation have not made a difference.
- Luxury wellness – why luxury is looking at wellness, what are the thematic opportunities and what would be the competitors for the main luxury marketing conglomerates be successful.
- Technical capability notice – having read thoroughly about the allegations that Apple had been served with an order by the British government to provide access to its customer iCloud drive data globally – I still don’t know what to think, but didn’t manage to assuage any of my concerns.
Books that I have read.
- World Without End: The million-copy selling graphic novel about climate change by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain. In Japan, graphic novels regularly non-fiction topics like text books or biographies. A French climate scientist and illustrator collaborated to take a similar approach for climate change and the energy crisis. Their work cuts through false pre-conceptions and trite solutions with science.
- Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski. Yablonski breaks down a number of heuristics or razors based on psychological research and how it applies to user experience. These included: Jakob’s Law, Fitt’s Law, Hick’s Law, Miller’s Law, Peak-End Rule and Tesler’s Law (on complexity). While the book focuses on UX, I thought of ways that the thinking could be applied to various aspects of advertising strategy.
- I re-read Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. Eyal’s model did a good job at synthesising B.J. Fogg’s work on persuasive computing, simplifying it into a model that the most casual reader can take and run with it.
- Kapferer on Luxury by Jean-Noël Kapferer covers the modern rise of luxury brands as we now know them. Like Dana Thomas’ Deluxe – how luxury lost its lustre Kapferer addresses the mistake of globalised manufacturing and massification of luxury. However Kapferer points out the ‘secret sauce’ that makes luxury products luxurious: the hybridisation of luxury with art and the concept of ‘incomparability’. The absence of both factors explain why British heritage brands from Burberry to Mulberry have failed in their current incarnations as luxury brands.
- Black Magic by Masamune Shirow is a manga work from 1983. Masamune is now best known for the creation of Ghost In The Shell which has been turned into a number of anime films, TV series and even a whitewashed Hollywood remake. Despite the title, Black Magic has more in common with space operas like Valerian & Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières than the occult. In the book Masamune explores some of the ideas which he then more fully developed in Ghost In The Shell including autonomous weapons, robots and machine intelligence.
- Doll by Ed McBain. Doll was a police procedural novel written in 1965 that focused on the model agency industry at the time. The novel is unusual in that it features various artistic flourishes including a model portfolio and hand written letters with different styles of penmanship. The author under the McBain pen name managed to produce over 50 novels. They all have taunt dialogue that’s ready for TV and some of them were adapted for broadcast, notably as an episode of Columbo. You can see the influence of McBain’s work in the likes of Dick Wolf’s productions like the Law & Order, FBI and On Call TV series franchises.
Things I have been inspired by.

Can money make you happy?

Past research indicated that happiness from wealth plateaued out with a middle class salary. The latest research via the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania indicates that might not be the case instead, earning more makes you happier and there might not be a point at which one has enough. The upper limit on the research seems to have been restricted by finding sufficiently rich research respondents rather than natural inclination. As a consumer insight that has profound implications in marketing across a range of sectors from gaming to pensions and savings products.

AgeTech

I came across the concept of ‘agetech’ while looking for research launched in time for CES in Las Vegas (7 – 11, January 2025). In the US, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and American Association of Retired People (AARP) have put together a set of deep qualitative and quantitative research looking at the needs of the ‘aged consumer’ for ‘AgeTech’. AgeTech isn’t your Grandma iPad or your boomer CEO’s laptop. Instead it is products that sit at the intersection of health, accessibility and taking care of oneself in the home. The top five perceived age technologies are connected medical alert devices,digital blood pressure monitors, electric or powered wheelchairs/scooters, indoor security cameras, and electronic medication pill dispenser/reminders. Their report 2023 Tech and the 50-Plus, noted that technology spending among those 50-plus in America is forecast to be more than $120 billion by 2030. Admittedly, that ’50-plus’ label could encompass people at the height of their career and family households – but it’s a big number.

It even has a negative impact on the supply side of the housing market for younger generations:

The overwhelming majority (95%) of Americans aged 55 and older agree that aging in place – “the ability to live in one’s own home and community safely, independently, and comfortably, regardless of age, income, or ability level” – is an important goal for them. This is up from 93% in 2023.

The Mayfair Set v 2.0

During the summer of 1999, a set of documentaries by Adam Curtis covered the reinvention of business during the latter half of the 20th century was broadcast. I got to discover The Mayfair Set much later on. In the documentaries it covered how the social contract between corporates and their communities was broken down and buccaneering entrepreneurs disrupted societal and legal norms for profit. There is a sense of de ja vu from watching the series in Meta’s business pivots to the UK government’s approach to intellectual property rights for the benefit of generative AI model building.

It probably won’t end well, with the UK population being all the poorer for it.

The Californian Ideology

As to why The Mayfair Set 2.0 is happening, we can actually go back to a 1995 essay by two UK based media theorists who were at the University of Westminster at the time. It was originally published in Mute magazine.

This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, websites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA.

It reads like all these things at once:
- A prescient foreshadowing from the past.
- Any Stewart Brand op-ed piece from 1993 onwards.
- The introduction from an as-yet ghost written book on behalf of Sam Altman, a la Bill Gates The Road Ahead.
- A mid-1990s fever dream from the minds of speculative fiction authors like Neal Stephenson, William Gibson or Bruce Sterling.
What the essay makes clear is that Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are part of a decades long continuum of Californian Ideology, all be it greatly accelerated; rather than a new thing. One of the main differences is that the digital artisans no longer have a chance to get rich with their company through generous stock options.

Even Steve Jobs fitted in with the pattern. For a hippy he drove a 5 litre Mercedes sports car, parked in the handicapped spaces in the Apple car park and had a part in firing Apple’s first gay CEO: Michael Scott because of homophobia and Scott’s David Brent-like handling of Black Wednesday. It may be a coincidence that Tim Cook didn’t come out publicly as gay until over three years after Steve Jobs died.

… a European strategy for developing the new information technologies must openly acknowledge the inevitability of some form of mixed economy – the creative and antagonistic mix of state, corporate and DIY initiatives. The indeterminacy of the digital future is a result of the ubiquity of this mixed economy within the modern world. No one knows exactly what the relative strengths of each component will be, but collective action can ensure that no social group is deliberately excluded from cyberspace.

A European strategy for the information age must also celebrate the creative powers of the digital artisans. Because their labour cannot be deskilled or mechanised, members of the ‘virtual class’ exercise great control over their own work. Rather than succumbing to the fatalism of the Californian Ideology, we should embrace the Promethean possibilities of hypermedia. Within the limitations of the mixed economy, digital artisans are able to invent something completely new – something which has not beenpredicted in any sci-fi novel. These innovative forms of knowledge and communications will sample the achievements of others, including some aspects of the Californian Ideology. It is now impossible for any serious movement for social emancipation not to incorporate feminism, drug culture, gay liberation, ethnic identity and other issues pioneered by West Coast radicals. Similarly, any attempt to develop hypermedia within Europe will need some of the entrepreneurial zeal and can-do attitude championed by the Californian New Right. Yet, at the same time, the development of hypermedia means innovation, creativity and invention. There are no precedents for all aspects of the digital future. As pioneers of the new, the digital artisans need to reconnect themselves with the theory and practice ofproductive art. They are not just employees of others – or even would-be cybernetic entrepreneurs.

They are also artist-engineers – designers of the next stage of modernity.

Barbrook and Cameron rejected the idea of a straight replication of the Californian Ideology in a European context. Doing so, despite what is written in the media, is more like the rituals of a cargo cult. Instead they recommended fostering a new European culture to address the strengths, failings and contradictions implicit in the Californian Ideology.

Chart of the month: consumer price increases vs. wage increases

This one chart based on consumer price increases and wage increases from 2020 – 2024 tells you everything you need to know about UK consumer sentiment and the everyday struggle to make ends meet.

Things I have watched.

The Organization – Sydney Poitier’s last outing as Virgil Tibbs. The Organization as a title harks back to the 1950s, to back when the FBI were denying that the Mafia even existed. Organised crime in popular culture was thought to be a parallel corporation similar to corporate America, but crooked. It featured in the books of Richard Stark. This was despite law enforcement stumbling on the American mafia’s governing body in 1957. Part of this was down to the fact that the authorities believed that the American arm of the mafia were a bulwark against communism. Back to the film, it starts with an ingenious heist set piece and then develops through a series twists and turns through San Francisco. It was a surprisingly awarding film to watch.

Nakita – Nakita is an early Luc Besson movie made after Subway and The Big Blue. It’s an action film that prioritises style and attitude over fidelity to tactical considerations. The junkies at the start of the film feel like refugees from a Mad Max film who have happened to invade a large French town at night. It is now considered part of the ‘cinéma du look’ film movement of the 1980s through to the early 1990s which also features films like Diva and Subway. Jean Reno’s character of Victor the Cleaner foreshadows his later breakout role as Leon. It was a style of its time drawing on similar vibes of more artistic TV ads, music videos, Michael Mann’s Miami Vice TV series and films Thief and Manhunter.

Stephen Norrington’s original Blade film owes a lot to rave culture and cinéma du look as it does to the comic canon on which it’s based. It’s high energy and packed with personality rather like a darker version of the first Guardians of The Galaxy film. Blade as a character was influenced by blaxploitation characters like Shaft in a Marvel series about a team of vampire hunters. Watching the film almost three decades after it came out, it felt atemporal – from another dimension rather than from the past per se. Norrington’s career came off the rails after his adaption of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did badly at the box office and star Wesley Snipes went to jail for tax-related offences.

The Magnificent Seven – I watched the film a couple of times during my childhood. John Sturges had already directed a number of iconic films: Bad Day at Black Rock and Gunfight at The OK Corral. With The Magnificent Seven, he borrowed from The Seven Samurai. It was a ‘Zappata western’ covering the period of the Mexican revolution and was shot in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The film did two things to childhood me: made me curious about Japanese cinema and storytelling. There are some connections to subsequent Spaghetti Westerns:
- Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (shot in 1964 would borrow from another Akira Kurosawa film Roshomon)
- Eli Wallach played a complex Mexican villain in both The Magnificent Seven and Leone’s The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.
- The visual styling of the film is similar to spaghetti westerns, though the clothes were still too clean, Yul Brynner’s role as the tragic hero in black is a world-away from the traditional Hollywood coding of the good guys wearing white hats (or US cavalry uniforms).
- The tight, sparse dialogue set the standard for the Dollars Trilogy and action films moving forward
- Zappata westerns were the fuel for more pro-leftist films in the spaghetti western genre. While The Magnificent Seven still has a decidedly western gaze, it took on racism surprisingly on the nose for a Hollywood film of this era.
Watching it now as a more seasoned film watcher only sharpened my appreciation of The Magnificent Seven.

Breaking News by Johnnie To feels as much about now as it when the film was shot 20 years ago. First time I watched it was on the back of a head rest on a Cathay Pacific flight at the time. Back then I was tired and just let the film wash over me. This time I took a more deliberate approach to appreciating the film. In the film the Hong Kong Police try and control and master the Hong Kong public opinion as a robbery goes wrong. However the Hong Kong Police don’t have it all their own way as the criminals wage their own information campaign. This film also has the usual tropes you expect from Hong Kong genre of heroic bloodshed films with amazing plot twists and choreographed action scenes along with the spectacular locations within Hong Kong itself. Watching it this time, I got to appreciate the details such as the cowardly dead-beat Dad Yip played by veteran character actor Suet Lam.

Useful tools.

Current and future uncertainties.

This could be used as thought starters for thinking about business problems for horizon scanning and scenario planning. It’s ideal as fuel for you to then develop a client workshop from. But I wouldn’t use something this information dense in a client-facing document. You can download it as a high resolution PDF here.

Guide to iPhone security

Given the propensity of phone snatching to take over bank accounts and the need to secure work phones, the EFF guide to securing your iPhone has a useful set of reminders and how-to instructions for privacy and security settings here.

Novel recommendations

I got this from Neil Perkin, an LLM-driven fictional book recommendation engine. It has been trained on Goodreads (which reminds me I need to update my Goodreads profile). When I asked it for ‘modern spy novels with the class of John Le Carre’ it gave me Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, Chris Pavone’s The Expats and Chris Cumming’s The Trinity Six. All of which were solid recommendations.

Smartphone tripod

Whether it’s taking a picture of a workshop’s forest of post-it notes or an Instagrammable sunset a steady stand can be really useful. Peak Design (who were falsely accused of being a ‘snitch‘) have come up with a really elegant mobile tripod design that utilises the MagSafe section on the back of an iPhone.

Apple Notes alternative

I am a big fan of Apple Notes as an app. I draft in it, sync ideas and thoughts across devices using it. But for some people that might not work – different folks for different strokes. I was impressed bu the quality of Bear which is a multi-platform alternative to the default Notes app.

The sales pitch.

I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my February 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into March.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.
February 26, 2025

More posts