My parents are not the target demographic for most brands. Like me they don’t see themselves represented on screen. Even the old guy from the Werther’s Original advert doesn’t appear any more.
https://flic.kr/p/2ic8pWv
Spending some time with them recently allowed me to see what brands might be missing out on and how they related to brands.
Why are they not the target demographic?
Let’s do a thought experiment. If we asked marketers about why my parents aren’t the target demographic. There would likely be a range of answers and I am guessing that these would be prominent amongst them:
They aren’t aspirational
They aren’t culturally relevant
We’re after lifetime spend, that means below 35
We don’t understand them
We can’t reach them
They’ll have set behaviours
They aren’t aspirational
Neither are most brands, despite what marketers might want to think. Your supermarket is full of functional brands, as are utilities like electricity, gas suppliers, water board, broadband and mobile operators. You don’t virtue signal your status through being on Plusnet, but you might do through your iPhone. Funnily enough the accessibility features, simplicity of design and ease of my providing technical support means that they run an Apple household. They do want their house to look nice, be clean and are thinking about replacing their car. They’d like to go out and see things and maybe even do a bit of travel.
One fact from the Pew Research Centre surprised me, but spoke directly to aspiration. Retirement age people are twice as likely than the working population to be entrepreneurs working in self-employment. BBH interviewed 20 retirement age people in Britain and found that they strived for significance.
They aren’t culturally relevant
Neither is the advertising industry a lot of the time, despite attempts to diversify it is still overwhelmingly southern and middle class. If you go up north commercial dance music radio sounds very different from what you would hear in London.
Even clothing brands signalling are different. At the moment in Liverpool, locally designed apparel brand Montirex is more common than Gym Shark, Nike or Under Armour. Is this difference reflected in what we see from ad agencies? Often not.
The advertising industry isn’t culturally relevant for a lot of young people let alone older people who would be considered to be not the target demographic. Finally, ZAK pointed out in their work Learn to Time Travel that culture is cross-generational. And we can think of lots of tastemakers who are older: streetwear OGs like Alex Turnbull, Marc Fraser, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Nigo, John Landis or Michael Kopelman. Slightly younger designers like Yoon Ahn, who is in her late 40s, are barely hitting their stride.
We’re after lifetime spend, that means below 35
Most western countries are aging. In the UK’s case the average age of the population is 43. People are living longer, but also wealth / power to spend moving in favour of older people and has been for a good while.
We don’t understand them
As an industry we have little, if any understanding of older people. We don’t work with older people according to the IPA agency census. No one retired in advertising last year, only 7% of our industry are 50 or over. The average age of our industry is 34.6 years old, compared to the UK average of 43.
In the US, the Pew Research Centre, alongside the likes of Ofcom in the UK have published some basic research to get things started.
BBH London have tried to start learning more about older consumers with their Silver Culture Project.
And just like youth culture demanded attention 70 years ago, this too deserves to be seen, heard and celebrated.
One in five people in the UK is over 65. In less than 20 years that will be one in four.*
The over 65s hold over half of the UK’s wealth, with the average 65+ household having a net worth of £500k-£1 million.
We can’t reach them
I was reminded of a LinkedIn post by Steve Walls where he talked about how little of the adverts celebrated by the ad industry he actually saw when he wasn’t on LinkedIn. It’s a sentiment I could relate to. Stepping away from LinkedIn and watching evening television with my parents, I ended up watching more FMCG-related advertising than I had seen during my usual more online-based life.
I particularly liked the way Flash had doubled down and repeated the same creative for the past four years or so.
My Dad got a bit excited showing me the Twix bears. They were short listed for Cannes in 2022 and as an advert it just works regardless of age. My Dad beamed as he talked along with the bears word-for-word. Kit Kats have been displaced in his shopping trolley by Twix.
The Twix bears
My Dad also likes the Vitality dachshund and the Compare The Market meerkats. While its reassuring seeing that fluent objects, humour and creativity work for all generations, it also implies that despite him being not the target demographic media planners still seem to be doing a better job reaching my Dad compared to myself (or Steve Walls.)
There are some less memorable ads out there such Colgate Total’s dentist endorsement.
They’ll have set behaviours
This fails to recognise two things. Older people do change behaviour over time if it makes sense. You can see this is higher than expected level of technology adaptation by older generations. For instance, they are still using cashless payments, despite a lifetime of cash and cheque books.
They are technology users, including smartphones, but less of them are using social media (and that might not be a bad thing). More retirement age people are working than ever before, the number in the US has doubled in a decade.
In my parents case, behavioural change came partly due to COVID, they embraced Amazon to buy cleaning products, supplements, motor oil and vacuum cleaner spare parts.
Secondly, behaviour change is often forced upon them from medically induced changes such as giving up smoking. Then you have physical changes from less range of movement, hearing or vision to incontinence.
Some brands have tapped into this market.
Always Discreet
Procter & Gamble have extended their Always menstrual pad brand to cover incontinence due to aging. Discreet are underpants with a built in pad allowing users to continue having a normal life. Procter & Gamble has managed to move from ‘not the target demographic’ to new product innovation and brand extensions.
Hong Kong MTR payphones to be pulled from all subway stations – SCMP – universal wireless coverage on MTR and universal cellphone ownership in population. One of the first clients that I worked with was a company called iMagic who made PowerPhones – a cross between a payphone and an internet enabled kiosk. These PowerPhones were rolled out across the MTR network and in Chep Lap Kok (paywall)
Daring Fireball: Doomsaying Apple Analyst Loses Job – as was once attributed to an IRA spokesperson about the Brighton bombing of the Conservative party conference in 1985 ‘…we only have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky always‘. Eventually expect a story that Adnaan Ahmad is eventually vindicated when Apple misses a quarter or two on its numbers
China to Require Internet TVs to Use Homegrown Smart TV OS | Marbridge Consulting – China’s State Administration of Press and Publication, Radio, Film and Television’s (SAPPRFT) Science and Technology Department and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT)’s Electronic Information Department recently announced a new smart TV operating system, TVOS 2.0 – (paywall)
China Antiterror Law Doesn’t Require Encryption Code Handovers – WSJ – China passed a new antiterrorism law that stepped back from previous language of concern to global technology firms, however its still very similar to Teresa May’s nosey parker powers in the UK (paywall)
Delivery Rates on Kickstarter by Ethan R. Mollick :: SSRN – Using a large survey with 47,188 backers of Kickstarter projects, I examined the factors that led to projects failing to deliver their promised rewards. Among funded projects, a failure to deliver seems relatively rare, accounting for around 9% of all projects, with a possible range of 5% to 14%. There are few indicators at the time of project funding as to which projects might ultimately fail to deliver rewards, though small projects (and to a lesser extent very large projects) are more likely to fail to deliver rewards, as are some project categories.
Writing about consumer grievance came from a couple of things. I was watching a lecture by professor Robert Reich at Stanford and it reminded me of Edelman‘s 2025 Trust Barometer report ‘Trust and the Crisis of Grievance‘.
Edelman’s annual report is a barometer, a global snapshot of who and what consumers trust. As long as I can remember Edelman’s report into trust of institutions has been in decline, but the 2025 report highlighting consumer grievance marked a perceived acceleration.
TL;DR
Why it matters: Most brands treat consumer complaints as a customer service headache to be managed by a chatbot. That is a massive commercial misstep. Grievance is not an admin burden; it is a raw, unvarnished map of what your audience actually cares about.
What is changing: We are seeing the rise of a distinct global grievance culture. When trust in traditional institutions wobbles, consumers direct their frustration at the brands they buy from. If you look closely at these grievances, you see the exact gaps where your business is failing to deliver on its promise.
The big picture: Two distinct trust economies now exist. There is the formal, corporate version presented in annual reports, and the real-world version lived by your customers. When the gap between the two grows too wide, the goodwill sitting on your balance sheet evaporates.
Global grievance
In the report Edelman posited that trust in institutions was no longer a universally shared civic resource. Around the world, it had become a luxury commodity that is heavily segmented by income and social class.
Putting my cards on the table
You the reader should question my interpretation as an enquiring mind. With that in mind, it makes sense to understand my starting viewpoint as I started to go through the subject matter. I agreed with the essence that Edelman’s research has captured. And the bifurcation of the economy is being baked into marketing plans that I have worked on over the past few years.
I have my doubts about their methods. I believe that their motives are good admittedly moderated by commercial considerations, but I did find myself questioning the techniques used and data transparency.
I set out to find high quality research that validated, or challenged the concept of consumer grievance.
Edelman’s original approach was triggered by the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’. The survey’s structural model was built upon the mid-1990s theories of Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama argued that institutional trust was primarily driven by upward mobility, structured legal systems, and guaranteed economic prosperity.
The Trust Barometer’s original respondents was restricted to “opinion leaders” or “opinion elites”. That mean’t highly affluent college-educated people aged 35 to 64 with high media consumption and active engagement in public policy. The demographic that prospective Edelman clients would sit neatly within.
Technological and economic change saw Edelman move to a general population sample. They also moved from telephone interviews to online surveys. The number of respondents increased from 1,300 in five countries to 36,000 respondents.
2020 saw a change in survey design that broke the idea of ‘to do what is right’ into two attributes:
Competence
Ethical behaviour
Business did well on competency but less well in ethical considerations. Government, media and NGOs were viewed as lacking in both . Edelman compensated for this by studying proximal trust and employee trust.
Edelman introduced the concept of ‘trust brokering’ – an organisations capacity to support dialogue and bridge social divides.
The Genesis of Global Grievance
With a flair for drama and storytelling Edelman’s Trust Barometer links the decline of trust and the genesis of consumer grievance back to the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’ protests against the World Trade Organisation ministerial conference held in the city. While a wide coalition of both left and right political figures, NGOs, organised labour were there to protest against unfettered globalisation the wheels were already in motion.
…globalization is not new, but that the present era of globalization, driven by competitive global markets, is outpacing the governance of markets and the repercussions on people. Characterized by “shrinking space, shrinking time and disappearing borders”, globalization has swung open the door to opportunities.
Breakthroughs in communications technologies and biotechnology, if directed for the needs of people, can bring advances for all of humankind. But markets can go too far and squeeze the non-market activities so vital for human development. Fiscal squeezes are constraining the provision of social services. A time squeeze is reducing the supply and quality of caring labour. And an incentive squeeze is harming the environment. Globalization is also increasing human insecurity as the spread of global crime, disease and financial volatility outpaces actions to tackle them.
The above quote came from the introduction to the 1999 Human Development Report (HDR) by the United Nationals Development Programme (UNDP).
As the 1999 HDR introduction alludes, by 1999 globalisation was not new and was already happening from Japanese consumer electronics to Korean shipbuilding. Instead globalisation was moving at a pace that institutions were no longer able to keep up with it or control it.
This viewpoint is supported by Professor Reich’s lecture on the factors driving the rise voter interest in populist leaders like President Trump. Reich outlines a four decades-long trajectory marked by:
The decoupling of productivity from wages. The US Board of Labour & Statistics paper Understanding of the labor productivity and compensation gap, considers the gap to have opened up in the 1970s. The fissure since the 1970s was also documented by the Economic Policy Institute’s work The Productivity-Pay Gap. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published research showed how corporate profits decoupled from employee compensation from the early 2000s on.
The Reagan era erosion of labour bargaining power. Similar erosion also took place in the UK under the Thatcher government.
The concentration of corporate market power. Deregulation from the 1980s on, allowed the financial and corporate sectors to become politically and economically dominant. Reich argued that this created a system average citizens perceived as rigged to favour corporations and big banks over ordinary workers. The 2008 bank bailout while ordinary citizens faced foreclosures cemented this perception. This isn’t only a western issue. 44% of China’s workforce now work in the gig economy.
The resulting financial exhaustion of the working and middle classes. American families employed three coping mechanisms to maintain their standard of living. First, they simply worked longer hours. Second, women entered the paid workforce in massive numbers, creating the dual-income household out of necessity. Third, the other measures reached their limit, they tapped into the equity in their homes, until 2008
The US Bureau of of Labour had three hypotheses for factors driving the labour compensation – productivity gap:
Globalisation: Increased offshoring shifted production and service activities to other countries. Consequently, income that might have previously gone to domestic workers was reallocated to intermediate purchases and foreign labour.
Increased Automation: As technological automation increases, the overall need for human labor input drops. When machines replace workers, the share of income dedicated to capital naturally increases relative to the share dedicated to labor.
Faster Capital Depreciation: Modern business capital, such as computer hardware and software, degrades or becomes obsolete much faster than the heavy machinery used in previous decades. Because these assets must be upgraded or replaced more frequently, a higher share of industry income must be diverted away from wages to cover these ongoing capital replacement costs
When the report explored specific industry sectors such as electrical power generation and supply, the divergence correlated with a fourth factor, deregulation. This happened to the US energy market in 1992.
The Energy Policy Act, 1992 created domestic competition. Incumbent local monopolies became more efficient or went under. Productivity was achieved through new technology and aggressive cost-cutting including layoffs. Workers produced far more value per hour, but because the company is fighting to keep prices low to compete, wages didn’t rise at that same rate.
Two trust economies exist
But all of these factors didn’t impact across society equally. What Edelman’s Trust Barometer acknowledged, but didn’t highlight at the time was the existence of two trust economies existing in the same space, but for different people.
The top quartile of income earners trusted the system. The bottom quartile didn’t. This was mirrored in findings by other organisations, notably the OECD’s Government at a Glance 2025 report and UNU WIDER Trust in a changing World 2025 paper.
There is a decline in governmental trust documented by the Pew Research Center Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025 – a consistent downward trend much longer than 1999, back as far as the mid-1960s for the American public, much earlier than Edelman’s work seems to suggest.
Business and consumer grievance
Edelman posits that businesses have become more trusted than governments. It’s a comforting anchor for a business that sells corporate reputation work. The reality may be different. The decline in government trust has merely set a very low bar according to research by Bentley University and Gallup. The rise of zero-sum thinking exemplified by Zero-sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), will sweep business attitudes along as part of systemic distrust. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace posits that this zero-trust thinking has brought conflict within the US itself and driven protests around the world – globalised consumer grievance.
The Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University documented an increase in political violence risk factors across the US mirroring the 1960s and early 1970s . German insurance company Allianz warned that this behaviour represented a risk to large businesses across their operations and supply chains. This is outside and separate to government military actions like the US – Iran conflict or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
There are problems inside organisations as well. Employer trust has been in decline according to Edelman. The causes are diverse and amplify consumer grievance:
Managers are supervising but failing to manage. They struggle to coach or develop their staff sufficiently.
Media sector consumer grievance
The media business is seeing the impact first hand. Fear of deliberate deception is at the cente of the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report for 2025. That fear is driving growing divisions in society and between societies, further feeling consumer grievance. According to The Reuters Institute Digital News Report of the same year these concerns about deception are driving audiences away from ‘legacy’ media companies to platforms of editorialists and opinion formers across podcasts, YouTube and other social platforms.
Edelman claims that this audience migration is down to beliefs about the motivations of media organisations. 75 percent of high-grievance respondents believe news organisations would rather attract a big audience than report what people actually need to know. 67 percent believe the media prefers to support an ideology over informing the public.
On slight glimmer from Edelman’s data was that trust in traditional media dropped by four points, versus trust in search engines dropping by five. But that delta will be cold comfort to media executives watching their business being eaten alive by technology platforms.
Goodwill on the balance sheet
Goodwill on the balance sheet of a company tries to capture brand value, the value of customer relationships and wider stakeholder trust within a business. PwC research provided some empirical evidence to support RoI on the stakeholder trust component of goodwill. But Edelman overreaches in its 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Growth in an Insular World report to try and do the same with brand value. In this case, Edelman tries to use survey responses, rather than observed behaviour data and the scientific method to try and overturn several decades of validated marketing science research.
Consumer grievance: so what?
It’s very easy to ignore consumer grievance as ethereal fiction or background noise. Being part of the solution can end up being part of the problem.
Brand purpose real talk
For some brands it make sense to pick a side, but if you do commit to the brand purpose. It may cost you, but if you really have a brand purpose, or ‘higher purpose’ as David Aaker called it, then the 30% opportunity cost in marketing effectiveness is worth it in your calculus.
Effectiveness expert Les Binet’s two question test on brand purpose makes a lot of sense:
Would you still do it if you couldn’t publicise it?
Would you still do it if reduced your long term profits?
If the answer to either question is no, then it’s not purpose driven.
Brand purpose can be a struggle to retrofit. After the success of Dove being re-positioned from a functional product to the ‘real beauty’ positioning; Unilever looked to replicate the effect with varying degrees of success.
You also need to be aware of brand purpose not being global. Apple, Meta and Nike have made decisions in Asia that are vastly different to what they do in western markets. There is no coherence or congruency in their world view. Neoliberal universal values died in corporations long before they were devalued in mainstream western political discourse. Both the online world and social media will shine a spotlight on this difference. This perceived corporate hypocrisy will increase consumer grievance and reduce consumer trust in the brand to do ‘the right thing’.
You could make the argument that Apple, Meta and Nike all fail Binet’s brand purpose test.
Outside of geopolitical differences, even the most basic demographic differences can be landmines for brand purpose. It’s an accelerant for consumer grievance and one that marketers at the likes of Unilever and P&G have either ducked, or got tonally wrong.
Patagonia is arguably the most prominent brand purpose led brand, yet it faces a slew of dilemmas. You could argue that Patagonia’s self description as being ‘a work in progress‘ is at best a temporary fix with an uncertain sell-by date during a time of consumer grievance.
Brand promise
The brand promise is the idea of what a consumer can expect from the product or service that they are purchasing. There is a temptation to reduce costs. You see this with automated services and reduced sized packaging.
If you are transparent about the trade-off consumers will self-select and be fine with it. Telecoms companies have been doing this for years.
Plusnet – BT’s no-frills ISP
Voxi – Vodafone’s self service brand that comes at a discounted price
Does your consumer journey penalise behaviour instead of rewarding loyalty. if it does, that will fuel consumer grievance. Audit these friction points and act on them. Fix underlying operations-related grievances and the customer lifetime revenue will take care of itself.
February 2026 introduction – (31) get up & run edition
I am now at issue 31, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘get up & run’. In Cantonese 31 isn’t a famous lucky number, it could considered to mean ‘life first’ implying an importance of vitality. On the plus side, it doesn’t have negative connotations of say 14 – which sounds similar to definitely die.
https://flic.kr/p/2mLcp75
I was sent a mix by an old friend of mine done by Frankie Bones at Amnesia House in August 1990 – as aural history its a fascinating treasure trove and occurred a pivotal time with several genres about to fragment from the original UK scene. Now we have our soundtrack let’s get into it.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
I appeared in the What’s In My Now newsletter talking small wallets, cheaper alternatives to Apple Studio monitors and making better use of LLMs. More here.
I gave a presentation for Outside Perspective on my Dot LLM era paper. Here is my speaking notes that I prepared as I got the presentation ready, complete with the slides at the relevant points.
I spoke to the WSJ about my dot LLM era thinking and was name-checked on their Take On The Week podcast. And I compared my research with Marc Andreessen’s of A16z 2026 AI outlook here.
I wrote a letter to the FT about Sony surrendering its home entertainment business (TVs, home audio) to Chinese TV maker TCL. While Sony’s current involvement in sectors such as elder care and insurance are worthy endeavours – what does it mean when they are more core to Sony’s identity than the home entertainment equipment that the brand built its empire on?
As well as being a concerned Sony customer, I was also thinking about what it means to a brand when it gets rid of its core raison d’être? You can read my letter here.
I was talking to a friend about classic films and suddenly Matthew Frank’s newsletter dropped in my inbox and started me down a rabbit hole exploring the idea of forgettable cinema as part of the modern public zeitgeist.
I pulled together a collection of adverts and campaigns celebrating lunar new year from across Asia and a couple aimed at the wider diaspora. As brands look to benefit from the year of the fire horse.
ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
Publicis widening the business gap versus its rivals. A decade spent preparing their data and foundational technology for machine learning.
WPP’s big pivot to adapt to market conditions for the large holding companies.
Dentsu’s change of leadership to better control strategy and manage global capabilities.
Michael Farmer on why reorganisation isn’t strategy, instead strategy should drive any reorganisation to meet the strategic objectives. This one proved a bit controversial, I’m not sure why.
Books that I have read.
While I have been looking forward for David McCloskey’s latest book The Persian to come out, I managed to finish The Seventh Floor. On one level The Seventh Floor is about espionage and feels very now given the new cold war. But it’s also about friendship, loyalty and personal betrayal. McCloskey doesn’t only bring expertise from a past career at the CIA, but also a deep love of the espionage novel as an art form and this novel gives a nod and a wink to the works of John Le Carré.
While the agency world is focused on the rise of AI, I decided to revisit Michael Farmer’s Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies. Ten years after it has been published, the diagnosis and the lessons from Farmer’s research seem to have been ignored by clients and the c-suites of holding groups. One thing I picked up on my revisiting the book was the challenge in defining strategic contribution and effort to campaigns. With creative output, Farmer managed to break down creative tasks into fixed ScopeMetric® Units (SMUs). But Farmer admitted that he couldn’t define strategy outputs in the same way because the context changed account-by-account. This makes sense given the difficulties I have had in the past when strategists were way oversold by the project management function within agencies.
Things I have been inspired by.
Insularity was the watch word of this year’s Edelman’s Trust Barometer. It was a pretty dark vision of the future. There is a huge delta between top income quartile of the population and their trust of authority and the bottom income quartile. In the lower quartile group there is little to no trust in authority figures (business, journalists, government). They only trust people like them.
Andrew Tindall published a new book for System1 based on their research and Effie data which reinforces previous publications by Orlando Wood, Les Binet, Peter Field and Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. It also reinforces the importance of context as part of creativity when media and creative functions are co-joined at the hip. It’s very readable and available for free here.
Chart of the month.
The surge of US measles infections turned into a politicised debate about vaccinations, competence, why Canada’s rates were even higher and whether things were as bad as experts would have you believe?
The chart only tells part of the story.
The US CDC cites a general hospitalisation rate of about 20% (1 in 5 cases), recent years have seen significant fluctuations depending on the specific age groups and regions affected by measles outbreaks.
The “Age Factor”: The high rates in 2022 and 2024 were largely due to the virus hitting children under five—the age group most likely to develop severe complications like pneumonia.
2022 – driven by an outbreak in Ohio, which had a high paediatric hospitalisation rate.
2024 – remained high throughout the year with nearly half of cases affecting children under 5.
Outbreak Size vs. Severity: In 2025, even though the total case count surged, the percentage of people requiring hospital care fell. This often happens when an outbreak moves beyond high-risk “pockets” into a broader, sometimes older, population.
2023 – outbreaks in unvaccinated high-risk clusters.
2025 – hospitalisation rates dropped because the virus spread to older demographics and larger, but less severe clusters
2026 – infections in January had few children under 5 affected. Cases were able to be managed at home.
Vaccination Impact: Across all these years, the vast majority (over 90%) of hospitalised patients were either unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.
Canada’s rates are high because the population has a significant amount of unvaccinated immigrants and refugees from conflict zones and the developing world.
Things I have watched.
Thomas Harris’ Silence of The Lambs still has legs in culture. Which is why Amazon Prime Video has gone back to the universe with Clarice. The story takes place in the aftermath of the buffalo Bill killings which drove the plot of Silence of the Lambs. The storytelling is top notch with a fantastic plot twist in episode 1. It is well worth your time to at least give the first few episodes a chance.
It started off in an unpromising way, several years ago a friend left a DVD with me. They said something along the lines of they liked a number of Werner Herzog films, but that this was too weird for them. I finally got to sit down and watch Fata Morgana.
It doesn’t have a story, but is beautifully shot footage of the Sahara and Sahel in 1969 with a focus on near horizon mirages (from which the film gets its name) and features the human effect on it from vistas of oil processing equipment to barbed wire and crashed planes.
There is a poetic narration in German over the top with a range of music to flt the landscapes. It feels like a forerunner of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsimade a decade later. It’s easy to watch.
I spent a weekend with my Dad going through old VHS cassettes and on one of them we found Four Fast Guns. It is a surprisingly good Hollywood western. While not a John Ford film, it has a grittiness due to superior character development and tight storytelling reminiscent of the very best spaghetti westerns. The film was produced by an independent studio and featured three well recognised character actors as its star performers.
Edgar Buchanan acted alongside the likes of Clint Eastwood, James Garner, John Wayne, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott he went on to appear in several TV series that I remember watching on repeat as a child in Ireland including The Beverley Hillbillies and The Twilight Zone.
Martha Vickers had appeared in The Big Sleep alongside Lauren Bacall.
James Craig had acted alongside everyone from John Wayne to Boris Karloff.
This gave the director much more creative freedom to make the performances pop on-screen. The climatic plot twist is very good.
I was inspired by watching Reflection in a Dead Diamond last month to watch Danger: Diabolik. The psychadelic motifs of and dream sequences of Reflection in a Dead Diamond seemed to draw from European cinema’s brief flirtation with super spy and super villain films during the 1960s. Danger: Diabolik was Mario Bava’s and Dino DeLaurentis’ take on the French Fantômas film series.
Bava’s expertise in genre films and special effects gives Danger: Diabolik a more sophisticated look than you would give it credit. Add in the film’s 1960s modernist aesthetic, James Bond type action sequences and you have a winning film. The humour-heist plot is very of its time but still entertaining and cried out for a remake. Terry-Thomas’ character performance as a government minister in the film is one of brilliance.
Useful tools.
I was saddened to read of the demise of The World Fact Book published by the CIA. I found it invaluable as a starting point when getting up to speed on international campaigns on parts of the world that I hadn’t visited. It even helped me win some work with Telenor Myanmar back before the current military regime got back into power. According to this post on the CIA website the World Fact Book is going away.
This personal productivity playbook by CJ Casseili was interesting to read and some of you may find tips and tricks that you can apply in your own work and personal life.
Ilina Scott’s quick guide to AI tools for strategists is worth a read if you are just dipping your toe in the field.
Occasionally software comes along what doesn’t become a mainstream success, but is well loved and much missed when it disappeared. Apple’s HyperCard was one, another was Yahoo! Pipes. The idea behind Pipes has been resurrected and in its latest iteration is very useful, even in a time of AI-with-everything.
The sales pitch.
i am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.
With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors.
My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.
The Strategic Toolkit:
Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.
Ok this is the end of my February 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and good luck with your new year’s resolutions. As an additional treat here is a link to a presentation I gave to the Outside Perspective crew, in Adobe Acrobat format.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.
A post on AI sovereignty came out of one of those times when a casual conversation suddenly has you seeing the theme in your news feeds. I was having one of them conversations with a friend over a paper cup of coffee, mentioned I’d been embedded at Google and they said ‘we can’t trust the Americans with AI, the way we did with social’.
https://flic.kr/p/New7y
That opens opportunities. Chinese open source models are working in Singapore government data centres, Korean cloud computing company Naver is looking beyond its own country for clients who want an alternative to US big technology. France has gone it alone with its own defence AI – as the ultimate expression of AI sovereignty.
The All-Star Chinese AI Conversation of 2026 | ChinaTalk – Interesting discussions on China based AI platforms on their successes and challenges. By their nature, the give China defacto AI sovereignty. Risk taking and GPUs or TPUs performance seem to be the main sources of concern. A good deal of focus on squeezing out the maximum intelligence per watt rather than scaling to infinity and beyond. Tonality wise it’s refreshing down to earth in comparison to Altman et al.
‘South Korea’s Google’ pitches AI alternative to US and China | FT – Korea has built up positive relations in the Middle East since the 1970s when they helped on major construction and engineering projects. They would be viewed positively and as a good hedge to both the US and China from a technology dependency point-of-view. Their offer is greater AI sovereignty for Middle Eastern countries in particular, you might also winning business in Central Asia as well.
It comes as a growing number of brands are moving into the children’s, teenage and young adult skincare market. In October, the first skincare brand developed for under-14s, Ever-eden, launched in the US. Superdrug has just created a range for those aged between 13 and 28.
A number of brands have surged in popularity among very young social-media users, creating a phenomenon known as “Sephora kids”. These children share videos showcasing beauty products from Drunk Elephant, Bubble, Sol de Janeiro and similar brands.
A Theory of Dumb: Why Are IQ Scores Suddenly Falling? | Intelligencer – a century ago, if you asked someone what dogs and rabbits have in common, they might answer “Dogs hunt rabbits,” not “They’re both mammals.”Maybe, then, all the noise and novelty wasn’t rotting our minds but upgrading them. (Studies suggest that better nutrition and reduced exposure to lead may have also helped.) In any case, the Flynn effect held steady for so long and through so many apparent threats that there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t last forever, even if, someday, somebody invented a chatbot that could do homework or Theo Von started podcasting.
Or so thought Elizabeth Dworak, now an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, when she chose the topic of her 2023 master’s thesis. She decided to analyze the results of 394,378 IQ tests taken in the U.S. between 2006 and 2018 to see if they exhibited the same climb. “I had all this cognitive data and thought, Hey, there’s probably a Flynn effect in there,” she says. But when she ran the numbers, “I felt like I was in Don’t Look Up,” the movie in which an astronomy grad student played by Jennifer Lawrence discovers a comet speeding toward Earth. “I spent weeks going back through all the code. I thought I’d messed something up and would have to delay submitting. But then I showed my adviser, and he said, ‘Nope, your math is right.’” The math showed declines in three important testing categories, including matrix reasoning (abstract visual puzzles), letter and number series (pattern recognition), and verbal reasoning (language-based problem-solving). The first two, in which losses were deepest, measure what psychologists call fluid intelligence, or the power to adapt to new situations and think on the fly. The drops showed up across age, gender, and education level but were most dramatic among 18-to-22-year-olds and those with the least amount of schooling.
How Hustle Culture Got America Addicted to Work – Business Insider – in America, the long, steady march toward a more leisurely future came to an abrupt halt. Today, according to the international economic database Penn World Table, the German work year is an astonishing 380 hours shorter than ours — which means that Germans work almost 10 weeks less than we do every year.
Even stranger, Americans began to glamorize their lack of free time. As the boomer generation reshaped society in its own image, it brought its ’60s, countercultural ethos to the workplace — transforming the staid, conformist office into a vessel of self-expression. Work became the central means by which you undertook to live your best life, follow your passion, and change the world. As Goldman bankers and Google idealists alike began to toil through the nights and weekends that previous generations had fought so hard to secure for them, mental-health professionals bemoaned the rise of what became known as “hustle culture.” Working long hours was suddenly the ultimate status symbol, a peculiarly American form of humblebrag. In 2017, a clever marketing study found that if you told an American you worked long hours, they assumed you were rich. If you told an Italian the same thing, they assumed you were poor.
Waymo Has Come for the Kids in Los Angeles – The New York Times – “Here, it is not unusual for families to have multiple children attending different schools far from home. School buses, if you are deemed eligible, are limited to dropping off and picking up children at locations and times that are often unhelpful. The city bus, if there is somehow a direct route to school, comes with its own set of risks that can make parents uneasy.
Ms. Rivera, a psychiatric social worker, is stuck at work until 6 p.m. most days, while her husband, who installs and repairs glass, comes home even later.
The couple struggles to coordinate their jobs and their three children. They tried Uber, and Lyft, but found that those drivers tended to cancel after discovering their riders were minors. They turned to HopSkipDrive, a service geared toward students, but the drivers had to be scheduled in advance, and would leave if children were late.
Then, a few months ago, Ms. Rivera and Alexis did a test run with Waymo.
“It was the only option where I was like, ‘Oh my God, she can order a car, nobody’s in there, she can unlock it with her phone,’” Ms. Rivera, 42, said. “I know she’s going to be safe and she’s going to get home.” – interesting use case
Chinese luxury goes local | WARC – High-end Chinese brands are stealing a march on their Western rivals with homegrown labels that appeal to more discerning local consumers who are looking for luxury items that feel tailored to them. China’s $49bn luxury market is “changing fast”: ecommerce sales at jeweller Lapou Gold, for instance, have surged more than 1000% in the first three quarters of this year compared with two years ago. Songmont, a Chinese brand that claims to have ‘experiential’ designer bags, has grown its online sales 90% while Gucci online bag sales in China have fallen 50%, according to the Business Times. – This was inevitable when you had so many talented (and a number of mediocre) Chinese people being brought through the likes of Central St Martins.
Coca-Cola CMO Manolo Arroyo on WPP, AI and a new era for media | The Drum – Coca-Cola’s marketing ecosystem was sprawling and complex. The business was working with approximately 6,000 agency partners globally, while the majority of its multi-billion-dollar media budget was allocated to traditional channels. Arroyo wanted fewer partners, deeper integration and a shift towards digital-first execution at scale.
That ambition led to the consolidation of Coca-Cola’s global advertising account into WPP and the creation of Open X, a bespoke unit designed to manage the brand across markets and disciplines. Nine studios were established in key regions, housing a mix of Coca-Cola employees, WPP staff and specialist partners.
“It’s a marketing factory,” says Arroyo. “There are more than 2,000 employees of Coca-Cola and more than 2,000 employees of WPP […] and ultimately it’s enabled us to move from a company that in 2019 was investing close to 75% of our paid media on traditional TV, to a company that’s going to end up this year putting 70% of all our paid media on digital, particularly social and influencer led, marketing. For us, it’s our new TV.”
Outcry after French army chief’s ‘prepared to lose children’ warning | Le Monde – “We have all the knowledge, all the economic and demographic strength to deter the Moscow regime from trying its luck by going further,” said Mandon. “What we lack, and this is where you have a major role to play, is the strength of spirit to accept suffering in order to protect who we are.”
Paying tribute to French forces deployed worldwide, he added: “If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept – let’s be honest – to lose its children, to suffer economically because defense production will take precedence, then we are at risk.” – I don’t think that the west is ready or able to face Russia or China because of this. The war is lost before its fought
SOF, AI, and Changing Western Conceptions of War | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University – Each generational shift in technology impacts military operations. Consequently, a shift in military training, command, and promotion structure should follow. Much of the conversation surrounding AI makes it seem like an unprecedented esoteric concept. While this is partly true, the same was said about steam engines during the Industrial Revolution. Simply put, AI is the next technological breakthrough and there will be more after it. As Clausewitz stated, the character of war changes, not the nature of war. A willingness to adapt while following strategic tenets will enable us to weather the storm and thrive in AI generation warfare. Failure to do so will only bring obsolescence while America’s adversaries gain global hegemonic status. Proper implementation of AI will result in faster decision making, more accurate intelligence, improved resource allocation, better spatial awareness, more effective messaging, and more impactful strategies. The key to reaching this level of success is SOF. SOF is uniquely equipped and trained to implement AI quickly and effectively, delivering results that can be scaled to the rest of the military.
A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code | WIRED – Phreeli, the phone carrier startup is designed to be the most privacy-focused cellular provider available to Americans. Phreeli, as in, “speak freely,” aims to give its user a different sort of privacy from the kind that can be had with end-to-end encrypted texting and calling tools like Signal or WhatsApp. Those apps hide the content of conversations, or even, in Signal’s case, metadata like the identities of who is talking to whom. Phreeli instead wants to offer actual anonymity. It can’t help government agencies or data brokers obtain users’ identifying information because it has almost none to share. The only piece of information the company records about its users when they sign up for a Phreeli phone number is, in fact, a mere ZIP code. That’s the minimum personal data Merrill has determined his company is legally required to keep about its customers for tax purposes.
Waking the Sleeping European Giant – by Matthew C. Klein | The Overshoot – “Europe” as a geopolitical entity does not exist. Instead of a strong and independent continent capable of securing the lives and freedoms of its citizens, Europe is divided into dozens of countries, all of which are too small individually to stand up to external threats. The problem is compounded by the mismatch between where the military resources can be found and where they are most needed. There is relatively little overlap between the places with the balance sheet capacity (mostly in the north), the places with the productive capacity (mostly in the center), the places with the largest populations of otherwise unoccupied fighting-age men (more in the south), and Europe’s front lines (largely, although not exclusively, in the east).
Bending Spoons raids the digital graveyard for paranormal returns | FT – businesses in the Bending Spoons stable: AOL, the dial-up internet service that had been most recently attached to Yahoo, and Evernote, the virtual scratch pad. – alongside Vimeo and Brightcove with Eventbrite due to join them
