This is spot for the Toyota Hilux was done by Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand. I was reminded of how growing up in Ireland, people would pull up in their cars, vans, trucks or tractors like this and chat in the middle of the local market town.
It touches on quirkiness, the diverse nature of use cases for the Toyota Hilux and social distancing.
Big Car did a really good history of the Toyota Hilux. It is impressive how little the Hilux has changed over the years. It’s simplicity has made the Toyota Hilux a very reliable vehicle
General Magic Personal Communicator
Film maker David Hoffman, put together a super cut of film that he’d shot for US carrier about General Magic’s Personal Communicator.
What becomes apparent is that mobile computing has got smaller, but conceptually hasn’t changed that much. Yes the literal ‘desk’ from General Magic seems a little strange. It was a software metaphor that Apple deployed on the Lisa workstation. It also feaArktronics Jane and Microsoft ‘Bob’ a year later in 1995.
You can see thinking not that far removed from it in the early skeuomorphic designs in the early versions of iOS. (The notepad app had spiral binding and ‘textured’ paper.)
General Magic’s icons are the predecessor of today’s emojis and stickers found in Messenger applications by the likes of Apple, LINE, WeChat, Kakao and Facebook.
Electronic personal assistants, later became ‘software agents’ that went out on the early web. It isn’t that far from Wildfire, Hello Google or Siri.
Brexit
I am not a fan of John Major, but this speech has got a lot of good content in it, particularly on the subject of Brexit. More on his speech here.
Markku Alén
And lastly, just for the hell of it; vintage Chris Harris. In the cockpit with Markku Alén piloting a Lancia Stratos.
Hydrogen power and hydrogen fuel cells have been around for decades. Hydrogen power fuel cells as an invention were invented in the 19th century. The modern hydrogen fuel cell was refined before the second world war and have been used in NASA’s space programme since Project Apollo. The space programme’s use of hydrogen power inspired General Motors to create a hydrogen fuel cell powered van in 1966. By the late 1980s, BMW had developed a hydrogen-powered engine which it trialled in its 7-series vehicles a decade later.
By the mid-2010s there were four hydrogen power passenger cars using fuel cells: Honda Clarity, Toyota Mirai, Hyundai ix35 FCEV, and the Hyundai Nexo. BMW is collaborating with Toyota to launch another four models next year.
In addition in commercial vehicles and heavy plant Hyundai, Cummins and JCB have hydrogen power offerings. JCB and Cummins have focused on internal combustion engines, while Hyundai went with hydrogen fuel cells. The aviation industry has been looking to hydrogen power via jet turbines.
Hydrogen power offers greater energy density and lower weight than batteries. Unlike batteries or power lines, hydrogen can be transported over longer distances via tanker. So someplace like Ireland with wind and tidal power potential could become an energy exporter.
The key hydrogen power problem has been investment in infrastructure and an over-reliance on batteries. Batteries bring their own set of problems and a global strategic dependency on China.
Toyota is now warning that if there isn’t imminent international investment, that China will also dominate the supply chain, exports and energy generation in the hydrogen economy as well. It feels like me reaching a historic point of no return.
Skincare you can wear: China’s sunwear boom | Jing Daily – A jacket with a wide-brim hood and built-in face shield. Leggings infused with hyaluronic acid to hydrate while shielding skin from the sun. Face masks with chin-to-temple coverage. Ice-cooling gloves designed to drop skin temperature. In China, UV protection apparel isn’t just functional — it’s fashionable, dermatological, and high-tech. Once a niche category for hikers or extreme sports enthusiasts, China’s sunwear market has exploded into a $13 billion category blending climate adaptation, anti-aging culture, and the outdoor lifestyle wave. While other apparel segments slow, the sunwear sector is projected to reach nearly 95.8 billion RMB ($13.5 billion) by 2026 expanding at a CAGR of 9%, according to iResearch.
MACAU DAILY TIMES 澳門每日時報Beware of Li Kashing’s supersized value trap – But as the initial excitement starts to fade, investors are growing nervous, wary of a billionaire family that has a poor track record on shareholders’ returns. The Li clan takes pride in the myriad of businesses and markets it operates in. But what kind of value-add can a diversified conglomerate offer when globalization is out of favor and geopolitical risks are on the rise? CK’s de-rating has accelerated since Trump’s first term, with the stock trading at just 35% of its book value even after the recent share bump. The complex business dealings have made enterprise valuation an impossible task. In a sign of deep capital market skepticism, CK seems to have trouble monetizing its assets. Its health and beauty subsidiary A.S. Watson is still privately-held, a decade after postponing an ambitious $6 billion dual listing in Hong Kong and London. Softer consumer sentiment in China, once a growth market, has become a drag. Last summer, CK Infrastructure did a secondary listing in the UK, hoping to widen its investor base. – Rare direct criticism of CK Hutchison’s conglomerate discount.
Ghost in the Shell’s Creator Wants to Revisit the Anime, But There’s One Problem – Production I.G’s CEO Mitsuhisa Ishikawa—who produced both Ghost in the Shell films—spoke at the event. Ishikawa revealed a key obstacle preventing a third film: finances. He explained that Innocence had an enormous budget, estimated at around 2 billion yen (approximately $13 million), with profits reaching a similar figure. However, the film was planned with a ten-year financial recovery period, and even after 20 years, it has yet to break even.
‘Gucci’s 25% sales collapse should shock no one’ | Jing Daily – “Gucci is so boring now.” “They’ve lost all their confidence.” “It feels desperate — just influencers and celebrities.” Comparing Gucci’s bold, visionary eras under Tom Ford and Alessandro Michele and today’s safe, uninspired iteration reveals a stark contrast. That classroom moment reflected a broader truth: Gucci’s Q1 2025 is not a temporary dip. It’s the result of a deeper structural identity crisis — arguably one of the worst brand resets in recent luxury history.
Welcome to my March 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 20th issue. Or one score, as they used to say down the Mecca bingo hall. A score is a common grouping used in everything from selling produce to indicating the scale of an accident in a news headline. In Japan, it signals legal adulthood and is celebrated with personal ceremonies.
I didn’t know that March was Irish-American Heritage month. I just thought that we had St Patrick’s Day.
Hopefully April will bring us warmer weather that we should expect of spring. In the meantime to keep my spirits up I have been listening to Confidence Man.
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 curated some of the best analyses on DeepSeek, and more interesting things happening online.
Pharmacies are blatantly marketing prescription-only medicines. It’s illegal, there is no GLP-1 permission that allows consumer marketing of prescription-only medicines used for weight loss and weight management.
Clutch Cargo – how a 1960s animation managed to transform production and show the power of storytelling.
A look back at Skype. I will miss its ring tone when it shuts down in May.
Looking at the Majorana 1 chip promising a new generation of quantum computing, generative AI production, refrigeration and an oral history of Wong Kar wai’s In theMood for Love&2046.
Books that I have read.
Now and again you come across a book that stuns you. Red Sky Mourning by Jack Carr, is one such book, but not in a good way. Carr is famous because of his service in the American military which he has since parlayed into a successful entrepreneurial career from TV series to podcasts. So he covers all things tactical knowledgeably. Conceptually the book has some interesting ideas that wouldn’t feel that out of place in a Neal Stephenson or William Gibson novel. So Carr had a reasonably solid plan on making a great story. But as the saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Carr’s enemy was his own writing style without aggressive editing. The editing process is a force multiplier, breathing the artistic brevity of Ernest Hemingway into a manuscript and protecting the author from their own worst impulses. I found the book hard to read because I would repeatedly run up against small niggly aspects, making it hard to suspend disbelief and get into the story. Carr loves his product brands, in this respect Red Sky Mourning reminded me a lot of early Brett Easton-Ellis. Which got me thinking, who is Carr actually writing for? Part of the answer is Hollywood, Carr’s books have been optioned by Amazon, one of which was adapted as The Terminal List. I imagine that another audience would be young (privileged caucasian male) management consultant types who need a bit of down time as they travel to and from client engagements – after a busy few days of on-site interviews, possibly with a tumbler of Macallan 12 – which was purchased in duty-free. The kind of person who considers their Tumi luggage in a tactical manner. The friend who gave it to me, picked it up for light reading and passed it on with a degree of incredulity. On the plus side, at least it isn’t a self-help book. It pains me to end a review so negatively; so one thing that Jack Carr does get right is the absolute superiority of Toyota Land Cruisers in comparison to Land Rover’s products. If you have it in hard copy, and possess sufficient presence of mind, it could serve you well in improvised self-defence as it comes in at a substantial 562 pages including the glossary and acknowledgements.
The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji is a classic murder mystery. A university crime club with each member named after a famous fictional detective gather to investigate a murder on an isolated island. The book slowly unravels the answer to the K-University Mystery Club’s annual trip bringing it to a logical conclusion.
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan was an interesting piece of Chinese historical fiction. It is less fantastic than the wuxia works of Louis Cha that dominated the genre previously. More here.
Chinese Communist Espionage – An Intelligence Primer by Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil tells the story of modern China through the story of its intelligence services. From the chaos under Mao purges and the Cultural Revolution to forces let loose by ‘reform and opening up’. More here.
In the early 2000s, as we moved towards a social web, we saw a number trends that relied on the knowledge of a group of people. Crowdsourcing channeled tasks in a particular way and became a popular ‘innovation engine’ for a while. The wisdom of crowds captured the power of knowledge within nascent question and answer platforms. Prediction markets flourished online. Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner try and explain who and why these models work, particular where they rely on knowledge or good judgement. The book does a good job at referencing their sources and is readable in a similar way to a Malcolm Gladwell book.
Things I have been inspired by.
Why does humour in advertising work?
My Dad is a big fan of the Twix bears advertisement, so much so, that he repeats the script verbatim when it comes on. We know that humour works and that it’s under-used in advertising, but it would be good to have data behind that in order to support it as a suggestion to clients.
Humour as a memory hook: Comedy surprises and delights, it makes consumers stop, engage and then remember. Over time it builds into nostalgia.
It relies on universal insights – that work across age cohorts, cultures and geographies. Its also intrinsically shareable – and not just on social platforms.
Celebrity x humour drives fame: Well-executed humour paired with celebrity endorsements, (Ryan Reynolds being a standout example) boosting brand impact.
Well executed humour can supercharge marketing ROI. Ads with humour are 6.1x more likely to drive market share growth than neutral or dull ads.
Accessible advertising
The Ad Accessibility Alliance have launched The Ad Accessibility Alliance Hub, which made me reflect on accessibility as a subject. I can recommend the hub as it provides good food for thought when considering mandatories for creative. ISBA’s reframing accessible advertising helps make the business case beyond the social benefits of inclusivity. The ISBA also provides links to useful assets. Finally, I can recommend Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge which provides a broader context to help think about accessible advertising as part of a system.
Social platform benchmarks
RealIQ have done great research of engagement rates across thousands of brands in a number of sectors. What we get is an engagement benchmark set across platforms and industries. We can debate the value of engagement, and the different nature of platforms, so you can’t compare across platforms.
Chart of the month.
What I could compare in the RealIQ data was the rate in change in engagement rates year-on-year. The clear losers over time were Facebook and Twitter at an aggregate level. This also explains the x-tortion (as Forrester Research described them) tactics being deployed by Twitter. Combining high rates of engagement decline and reduced reach means that Twitter doesn’t look particularly attractive as a platform vis-a-vis competitors.
Things I have watched.
Hunt (헌트) is a great Korean film. It provides a John Le Carré style spy hunt story in 1980s era South Korea prior to the move towards democracy. It’s a stylish, if brutal film that touches on parts of South Korea’s history which we in the west tend to know very little about. Hunt takes an unflinching look at the legacy of the military government as well as their North Korean rivals.
Philip Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff is a movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s account based on US post-war fighter development through to the height of the Mercury space programme. The film went on to receive eight nominations at the Academy Awards. You have an ensemble cast of great character actors who deal with the highs and lows at the cutting edge of aerospace technology. The Right Stuff is as good as its reputation would have you believe. The film captures the drama and adventure that Wolfe imbued his written account of the journey to space. As a society it is good to be reminded that if we put our mind to it the human race is capable of amazing audacious things.
Disco’s Revenge – an amazing Canadian documentary which has interviews with people from soul and disco stars including Earl Young, David Mancuso, Joe Bataan, Nicky Siano – all of whom were seminal in the founding of disco.
It also featured names more familiar to house music fans including DJ Spinna, Frankie Knuckles, Kevin Saunderson and John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez – who was key in proto vocal house productions.
The documentary also shows hip-hop was influenced by disco mixing.
Along the way it covers the fight for gay rights in the US and its easy to see the continuum onwards to house music and the current dance music scene. It’s one thing knowing it and having read the right books, but the interviews have a power of their own.
It takes things through to ‘club quarantine’ during the COVID-19 lockdown.
I hate that’s its streaming only, rather than Blu-Ray but if you can put that one issue aside and watch it. If you try it and enjoy it, you’ll also love Jed Hallam‘s occasional newsletter Love Will Save The Day.
I picked up a copy of Contagion on DVD, prior to COVID and watched it with friends in a virtual social manner during lockdown. This probably wasn’t the smartest move and I spent the rest of lockdown building my library of Studio Ghibli films instead. It’s a great ensemble film in its own right. Watching it back again now I was struck by how much Contagion got right from Jude Law’s conspiracy theorist with too much influence and combative congressional hearings.
The film makers had the advantage of looking back at SARS which had hit Hong Kong and China in 2002 – 2004. Hong Kong had already been hit by Avian flu H5N1 from 1997 to 2002. Both are a foot note in history now, I had a friend who picked up their apartment on the mid-levels for 30 percent below 1997 market rates due to the buffeting the Hong Kong economy took during this time. The only thing that the film didn’t envision was the surfeit of political leadership in some notable western countries during COVID, which would have added even more drama to Contagion, not even Hollywood script writers could have made that up.
Hong Kong film star Leslie Cheung was taken from us too early due to depression. But the body of work that he left behind is still widely praised today. Double Tap appeared in 2000. In it Cheung plays a sport shooter of extraordinary skill. The resulting film is a twisting crime thriller with the kind of action that was Hong Kong’s trademark. It represents a very different take on the heroic bloodshed genre. At the time western film critics compared it to The Matrix – since the US film was influenced by Hong Kong cinema. Double Tap has rightly been favourably compared by film critics to A Better Tomorrow – which starred Cheung and Chow Yan Fat.
Useful tools.
Knowledge search
Back when I worked at Yahoo!, one of our key focuses was something called knowledge search. It was searching for opinions: what’s the best dry cleaner in Bloomsbury or where the best everyday carry items for a travelling executive who goes through TSA style inspections a few times a week. Google went on to buy Zagat the restaurant review bible. Yahoo! tried to build its own corpus of information with Yahoo! Answers, that went horribly wrong and Quora isn’t much better. A more promising approach by Gigabrain tries to do knowledge search using Reddit as its data source. I’ve used it to get some quick-and-dirty qualitative insights over the past few months.
Digital behaviour ‘CliffsNotes’
Simon Kemp launched this year’s Digital 2025 compendium of global online behaviours. It’s a great starter if you need to understand a particular market.
Encrypting an external hard drive
I needed to encrypt an external hard drive to transfer data and hadn’t used FileVault to do it in a while. Thankfully, Apple has a helpful guide buried in its support documents. From memory the process seems to have become more complicated over time. It used to be able to be done by using ‘control’ and click on the drive before scrolling down. Now you need to do it inside Disk Utility.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my March 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and enjoy the Easter break.
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.
HSBC’s Zing shuts down. It didn’t manage to compete effectively against Revolut and Wise. Zing provided cheap foreign exchange. On the face of it HSBC had a number of use cases in its main retail banking markets that would have made sense.
Hong Kong:
7+ percent of the population are expats. This has been pretty constant over previous decades, though people are constantly coming and departing. A big group of these communities are domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. All of whom would benefit from cheap foreign money transfers.
Like other developed Asian countries, many young Hong Kongers study abroad. Having a way to cheaply transfer money to and from Hong Kong would be useful for this second group.
Finally Hong Kong has a diaspora, with families being spread across the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.
UK:
30+ percent of Londoners were born outside the UK. Overall, the UK had ethnic minorities which make up 8 – 10 percent of the population. Many of them have multi-generational links with their homelands.
The NHS in particular has a large proportion of skilled foreigners working for them from Filipino intensive care nurses to Greek X-ray technicians.
Zing decided to launch only in the UK. Despite HSBC’s footprint, it didn’t grab the visibility or market share achieved by Revolut or Wise. It also failed to make money and HSBC seems to have taken a shorter term view to succeed or quit compared to its startup competitors. One could charitably view Zing as a correct view of the ‘fast failure’ model, if learnings from it are taken from it by HSBC and applied effectively.
Zing is emblematic of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma where established companies lose market share as they fail to disrupt themselves to compete against new upstart businesses.
Financial innovation is hard. Barclays closed down their mobile payment system Pingit, NatWest stepped back from its digital bank offering and Vodafone has struggled to expand M-Pesa.
US TikTok ‘refugees’ make surprise move to China’s ‘RedNote’ | FT – Xiaohongshu’s technical team were not ready for the complexity of a western audience. What’s interesting is that the move was a political statement to US politicians and a tacit rejection of Meta’s competitor platforms very soon after their ‘pivot to free speech’.
Vintage | Hi-Fi News – modern reviews on classic hi-fi models that give you a realistic understanding about how they compare to the current state-of-the-art. A number of the pieces come off much more favourably than I was expecting.
Obsolete Sony are doing a great job at documenting Sony’s history:
Kameron Hurley: There Have Always Been Times Like These – Locus Online – Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom. –Ursula K. Le Guin
Luxury
ISSUE #1 — ARTSUMERISM – Power Dynamics by COPE – massification of luxury goods might have taken the artisan out of luxe. But has enabled it to develop an art collaboration somewhere between patron and influencer relationship.
Shoemaking experts Rose Anvil interview Fitasy on the advantages and challenges of using additive manufacturing for shoes. Fitasy provide a more realistic perspective on the circular economy benefits of filament printing at the end of the interview.
Will Video Kill the Audio Star in 2025? | Vulture – I find it a bit odd as an idea, but then I do listen to a lot of talking heads YouTube channels without looking at the participants such as TLDR, Chip Stock Investor et al and much of the CNBC content I listen to is an audio track from their TV feed.
UK’s elite hardware talent is being wasted. | Josef – this reminds me a lot of working in the chemical and petrochemical industry at the start of my career. When enough people opt out the capability collapses in on itself.
Japan Re-Emerges is Ulrike Schaede’s riposte to the neo-liberalist dogma that Japan is done. Since the bubble era finished, corporate Japan has been reinventing itself and building blue ocean strategies to stand up and out against the rise of China and South Korea. Schade has turned this journey into a book, Japan Re-Emerges. This interview was conducted at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan.
Going back to neo-liberal doctrine, Japan Re-Emerges offers a way out of the terminal societal and economic death role that many middle powers like the United Kingdom and Germany are currently undergoing – if they have the leadership who can make it happen. I’ll let you know how I get on with Schade’s book.
The Detroit of Asia
Thailand earned its name as the Detroit of Asia thanks to factories assembling vehicles like the Toyota Hi-lux and manufacturing a wide range of car parts. Nikkei put together a film on how Chinese electric vehicle makers have entered Thailand poaching staff, expertise and market share from Japanese manufacturers representing an existential risk of non-Chinese businesses and threatening how Japan Re-emerges.
Futurama
General Motors was a large conglomerate in the 1960s. This seems to be based on footage made at the New York World Fair of 1964/65. This Futurama exhibition was a homage to a similar one done at the 1939 world fair. The themes of the exhibition at the time reflect big societal concerns including overpopulation and creating adequate food. The seabed was seen as an equally momentous destination as space. Deep sea exploration was post-war phenomenon and the first submarine that had gone under the north pole did so only six years previously.
The space and modernist themed architecture feels like it’s from a different universe to our current world. Despite M Hubert King warning about peak oil in 1956, concerns about energy seemed premature at the time when nuclear power seemed to have so many uses and man was actively exploring outer space implying a technological solution was possible for everything. Out of this World as a film builds on the Futurama work done by General Motors as a cohesive vision of the future. While the Ford Motor Company still uses futurists, General Motors subsequent history is one of missed future opportunities, from the German, Japanese and Korean ‘invasions’, its futuristic EV1 car project to efforts in autonomous driving efforts.
Cadillac racing
At first I thought that the idea of a Cadillac racing programme was an oxymoron. As a European my idea of a Cadillac is the black armoured land barge that ferries the US president around, or its historic civilian equivalents that represented mid-century luxury prior to the German invasion of the U.S. car market. So I was curious when I came across No Perfect Formula.
What was more interesting about this film for me was that it was part of a wider trend. While Liberty Media’s Drive To Survive series looked to bolster its Formula One motorsports franchise, manufacturers like Cadillac and Porsche have been producing their own feature-length content and publishing it on YouTube – disintermediating brand partnership type deals with the likes of Netflix or Amazon Prime in favour of YouTube. This makes sense when one thinks about YouTube in terms of raw reach.
Where I think it gets more interesting is what is says about the value of the latent endorsement of a partner media brand and what this will mean for the likes of BBC Worldwide and non-subscriber revenue streams for streaming platforms.
