Category: consumer behaviour | 消費者行為 | 소비자 행동

Consumer behaviour is central to my role as an account planner and about how I look at the world.

Being from an Irish household growing up in the North West of England, everything was alien. I felt that I was interloping observer who was eternally curious.

The same traits stand today, I just get paid for them. Consumer behaviour and its interactions with the environment and societal structures are fascinating to me.

The hive mind of Wikipedia defines it as

‘the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and all the activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services.’

It is considered to consist of how the consumer’s emotions, attitudes and preferences affect buying behaviour. Consumer behaviour emerged in the 1940–1950s as a distinct sub-discipline of marketing, but has become an interdisciplinary social science that blends elements from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, anthropology, ethnography, marketing and economics (especially behavioural economics or nudge theory as its often known).

I tend to store a mix of third party insights and links to research papers here. If you were to read one thing on this blog about consumer behaviour, I would recommend this post I wrote on generations. This points out different ways that consumer behaviour can be misattributed, missed or misinterpreted.

Often the devil is in the context, which goes back to the wide ranging nature of this blog hinted at by the ‘renaissance’ in renaissance chambara. Back then I knew that I needed to have wide interests but hadn’t worked on defining the ‘why’ of having spread such a wide net in terms of subject matter.

December 2025 issue 29
December 2025 introduction – (29) rise and shine edition

I am now at issue 29, in Chinese numerology the number 29 is viewed positively, as it symbolises a long-lasting harmonious relationship. In bingo slang 29 is referred to as ‘rise-and-shine’ – ironic given that we’re currently enjoying the least daylight in any part of the year.

If you’ve managed to avoid Whamageddon – well done. I did my part with last month’s recommendation for Christmas music.

This time you can’t do much better capturing pure joy than Folamour at the Mixmag Lab in London. 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.

A quick look at the implications of the US government’s new National Security Strategy.

Rob Belk featured me in the Rambull newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed to his newsletter yet, I recommend doing so. It’s akin to a modern-day version of The Whole Earth Catalog, filled with carefully curated tools and useful resources, but without the tie-dye elephant pants. You can check it out here.

Books that I have read.
- Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen. I bought several books on the recommendation of friends during the COVD lockdown and am slowly whittling my way through the pile, Counterinsurgency was one of them. It’s a collection of writings by Australian academic David Kilcullen, who advised the US government from 2005 – 2006 about Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is a collection of his writings from articles in military journals repeating many of the lessons learned in the past about fighting against guerrillas to Indonesian history. I had done some campaigns in Indonesia in the past for Qualcomm and Indofoods, so was interested in the post-independence history within it at the time. More about the book here.
Things I have been inspired by.

Due to the timing on writing the last newsletter, I missed writing about how I got to spend an evening with senior in-house marketers thanks to The Ortus Club. The evening was held at a restaurant in Mayfair sharing experience of AI in terms of its benefits, future opportunities and challenges.

Discussion themes that resonated:
- There isn’t a lack of enthusiasm for generative AI in the corporate world.
- Generative AI work often isn’t checked, to the detriment of it. It’s a powerful assist but you need to trust but verify.
- IP concerns are holding back adoption and impacting tool choice by enterprises. Legal / regulatory departments are important AI gatekeepers.
- Picking the right AI tool for the right job, too many organisations are trying to use one AI tool for everything.
Toyota officially unveiled their GR GT and it’s gorgeous looking. It is also a strikingly different direction to the likes of Mercedes Benz and the Volkswagen Group of companies with only useful technology allowed. its rather different to the usual automotive approach of a computer that happens to have four wheels.

In what is fast becoming an annual end of year tradition, Iolanda Carvalho, Amy Daroukakis, Gonzalo Gregori and Ci En Lee compiled 135+ trend reports from various organisations and strategists tucked straight in. You can explore most of them using NotebookLM here.

Chart of the month.

Ipsos have been doing research in conjunction with Joe.co.uk looking at all things masculinity. One of the charts that stood out for me asked about the use of dating apps.

There was a clear gender gap between app usage numbers which represented an interesting challenge for product managers. It would merit further investigation as to the why. I have a couple of hypotheses:
- Your product didn’t engage with women as much as men.
- Your product is a poor medium to build up a rapport.
- Some sort of difference in on-app behaviour usage that divides genders.
- Your product carries social baggage that means women are less likely to admit that they have used your service.
You can see how dating app brands have tried to address this through in real life events and women move first in-app mechanisms.

Things I have watched.

I managed to get hold of Bullet In The Head on Blu Ray. While John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow. The Killer and Hard Boiled are respected by western directors, Bullet In The Head doesn’t get enough appreciation. The story of the film is almost as good as the film itself. Woo split with production partner Tsui Hark to direct his own script. Woo even self-financed the film. The film is Woo’s singular vision with influences including the Tiananmen Square student protests, Vietnam news reel footage and The Deer Hunter. Over time it had become hard to find and is under-appreciated. It’s not a perfect film because it was so ambitious in terms of its scale and there is a softness to the cinematography that you also see The Killer. Despite all that, it’s a fantastic film that I would thoroughly recommend. As a bonus, here’s a list of John Woo’s favourite films, as you can see he has impeccable taste.

Prison on Fire is part of my on-again, off-again tour through Ringo Lam’s filmography. Made in 1987, it has ‘Big Tony’ Leung Ka-fai who plays a graphic designer working in an ad agency who is sent to prison for manslaughter. He and his prison friend played by Chow Yun-fat navigate sadistic guards and violent triad convicts.

Prison on Fire 2 was Ringo Lam’s sequel to the first successful instalment of Prison on Fire. Chow Yun-fat returned to play his central role in the sequel, this time dealing with mainland prisoners, in addition to the usual triads and sadistic guards. In addition to the action, the film focuses much more on the relationship between Chow and his on-screen son. Given the various hot button issues in the film from a modern-day Hong Kong context:
- Triad – prison guard collusion
- Conflict between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese
- Blackening the name of the disciplined services* of the Hong Kong government (coastguard, police, corrections department, anti-corruption agency etc.)
You are unlikely to see the like of the Prison on Fire films again, they would be in contravention of NatSec aka Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Thief was Michael Mann’s film debut. A hard-bitten heist film with film noir vibes. James Caan plays the protagonist Frank, a professional safe cracker adept at drilling locks out or cutting the door open with a thermic lance. He partners with James Belushi who plays an alarm expert. Mann contrasts the professionalism of Frank executing heists with his awkwardness claiming the heart of his girlfriend. A lot of the tension and craft he later brought to Heat and Collateral are already on display in this first firm, for instance the way Mann shoots nighttime scenes and paces the film’s plot. Tangerine Dream give Thief an amazing soundtrack.

Useful tools.

I have been working on a number of video projects and we’ve been using Trint to allow a perfect transcript to be made from digital video rushes that would aid in the editing and post-production process.

Whether you prospecting for adtech or job-hunting; Mediasense’s agency family tree makes life easier.

If you are moving into a leadership position, Zoe Arden‘s Story-Centred Leadership: Crafting Cultures of Change is probably worth a look. The book looks at how leaders can use stories to drive change through an iterative process of ‘listening, building, shaping, sharing and living’ their stories, rather than treating the story as a one-and-done activation. That might sound a bit new-age and your mileage may vary in terms of how it works as a tool for your leadership style. But Zoe might be on to something. Nick Chater‘s The Mind is Flat looked at neuroscience and what we know about thinking arrived at the conclusion that stories are software for the brain and Story-Centred Leadership seems to come from a similar direction. (Disclosure: Zoe worked at my first agency, back then I worked at on B2B & consumer technology and telecoms clients.)

The sales pitch.

I have been 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 December 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and have a great Christmas and new year. Keep an eye out for my retrospective rundown of 2025.

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

Get in touch if you have any recommendations, and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.
December 22, 2025
November 2025 issue 28
November 2025 introduction – (28) in a state edition

I am now at issue 28, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘in a state’. In a state or in a right state usually carried a sense of trepidation in Irish households – it usually describes an odd emotion exhibited by the person being discussed.

It is often associated with stupor, shock, chaos, agitation or anxiety.

“There was a car crash just up the road; thankfully no one was injured but the driver was in a state.”

It could also be used as a tone of disapproval for a person’s grooming and outfit.

In Cantonese 28 has positive connotations and is interpreted as “easy to be rich” or “easy prosperity”. The pronunciation of ‘2’ (yi) sounds like ‘easy’ and ‘8’ (ba) sounds like ‘prosper’ (fa).

This edition’s soundtrack is from The Hideout, a former boutique that used to be based in Golden Square and specialised in Japanese streetwear brands like Neighborhood, A Bathing Ape, WTAPs etc. Each Christmas time they used to have this mixtape put together by Andrew Hale on heavy rotation. Since then it’s become a seasonal go to in Chez Carroll.

( Hale played keyboards for Sade. He was a member of Japanese experimental supergroup Water Melon (ウォーター・メロン) alongside Gota Yashiki, KUDO, Toshio Nakanishi aka Tycoon To$h, and provided soundtracks for computer games and films.) Ok, I will stop nerding out now.

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.
- Mico + more things – Mircrosoft’s AI companion has a bit of Clippy and a bit of Willo the Wisp (who was the brand character of British Gas) to it. But as a fluent object it’s not bad.
- Sixt Halloween ad + more stuff – a selection of great creative from Anthropic, Sixt, Apple and Life 360.
- Toyota FJ Land Cruiser + more stuff – Toyota’s genius move to launch a smaller footprint Land Cruiser with fantastic utilitarian details in the design. The downside is that we are unlikely to see any of them in the UK.
Books that I have read.
- I have been reading my Dad’s copies of Gerald Seymour’s books back when I was a child. My friend Ian introduced me to his later works and character Jonas Merrick. Crocodile Hunter explains the back story why a caravan-loving middle-aged ‘underachieving’ MI5 officer had been given so much latitude. Merrick then becomes the metaphorical crocodile hunter of the title in a game of wits with an experienced veteran of the Syrian civil war and Iraq conflicts in the environs of Canterbury.
- 1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin was a decade in the writing following on from his previous book Too Big To Fail about the 2008 financial crisis. Sorkin makes the story readable despite the book being chunky enough to be a door stop. He does so by telling the stories of the individuals involved. In doing so he also challenges many of our learned assumptions about the crisis. The timing of its release while concerns turn towards an AI driven stock market bubble gives it addition relevance.
- As I was reading this article in the FT How this 31-year-old made $250mn in 30 months | FT – oil trading with Russian oil. A few things crossed my mind. Amongst them being that it sounded like a pitch for prospective series two of McMafia. Will the protagonist fall out of a window from a Moscow skyscraper?
Things I have been inspired by.

I managed to spend some time with my long time colleague Calvin Wong on a stopover before he headed to Portugal for Web Summit.

It might be merely a rationalisation of my own biases, after the later part of the 2010s being a lull in the creative web. 2025 seems to be spawning more creative things built on the web. My current favourite is Radiooooo shocking brand name, but an amazing site. You can navigate a map of the world, click on a country and listen to music from that country. Not only that but can select whether you are open to fast, slow tempo songs or ‘weird’. My current favourites are Japanese, Thai and Cambodian pop of the 1960s.

The Impact of Visual Generative AI on Advertising Effectiveness by Hyesoo Lee, Vilma Todri, Panagiotis Adamopoulos & Anindya Ghose is an early piece of research on the effectiveness of generative AI created visual adverts. The research had a number of findings:
- When visual gen AI was used to modify existing ads originally created by human experts, its performance fell short of the original ads.
- When visual gen AI was used to create ads from scratch, those ads outperformed both the human expert–created and gen AI-modified ads.
- When everything including the product package created by gen AI in the advertisement was associated with higher ad effectiveness.
- But consumers still aren’t fans, when gen AI involvement in ad generation is disclosed, advertisement effectiveness decreases. Disclosure is becoming a legal requirement in many markets and cramping ad effectiveness.
These oddities could be down to how well their models performed with modified prompts, rather than a repudiation of human effort. And all of these nuances are likely to change as models are improved. This doesn’t mean that generative AI is the best advertising and packaging designers. But it does depend a lot on the aesthetic / taste of the human prompter even more.

Verity Relationship Intelligence newly released annual report for 2025 highlighted a number of interesting take-outs from its research. The things that stood out to me were:
- 20% growth every year since 2021 for client complaints about efficiency.
- 58% of what clients link efficiency to is non-operational. Efficiency,
  is a partnership quality rather than a production metric – kind of like the idea of synchronicity. Increasing ‘juniorisation’ of teams, hybrid working, and smaller budgets have created an operational squeeze, while automation and rigid systems stripped back the human touch that clients value most.
- The chasm opening up between rising client satisfaction (currently 8.0) and declining team satisfaction (7.3) in their agency team threatens work quality, client retention and employee churn. The problems stem from agency culture: little agency leadership, recognition or care.
Chart of the month.

Ipsos did a 30-country survey to answer the question ‘Is Life Getting Better? comparing attitudes to 1975 versus 2025. Nostalgia is a great standby for trend reports as the past is constantly been repackaged.

What the Ipsos report hints at is widespread dissatisfaction with current political and economic systems in Europe, Latin America, North America, South Africa and many Asian countries. Part of this maybe down to what Ipsos termed ‘the middle class in crisis‘. The contrary outlier was South Korea.

As tough as the Korean economy is now, the country has made a huge step change over the past five decades: shaking off a military dictatorship and undergoing massive economic development.

The UK’s intense desire for nostalgia hints at a wider unease, what The New Statesman called the Netflixification of politics.

Things I have watched.

Apple TV+ have followed up Slow Horses this season with a second adaptation of a Mick Herron novel Down Cemetery Road. Emma Thompson is the protagonist unearthing a very British conspiracy bought about by a suspicious fire and abducted child in Oxford. It is made to the same high standard as Slow Horses and I have found it to be must-see TV.

Dominic Cooper plays a blinder in Apple TV+ series The Last Frontier. The tangled storyline of conspiracy, paranoia and secrets reminded me of vintage TV series like 24 and The X Files. What separates The Last Frontier is the detail, its scenic shots of an Alaskan winter are beautiful.

Useful tools.

Koolyz is a directory / portal of online tools that I found via Matt Muir’s excellent newsletter. It helps on all the finicky tasks like compressing PDFs or moving an image from one format to another. It is also worth looking at The Creative Cheat Sheet for visual inspiration, writing and presentation building tools.

I got to try out Hubspot‘s AEO grader here. It is a good starting point to understand how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini ‘see’ and ‘understand’ your brand.

Finally LUMAscapes is a series of charts by LUMA that give you the main players in agencies, AI, OOH, martech and more categories as convenient PDFs.

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 November 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Christmas. As an additional treat here is a link to my Mam’s recipe for Christmas cake – we usually make one in November. It is then allowed to sit prior to serving at Christmas. If looked after correctly it can keep for several months. I grew up with and love fruit cake but your mileage may vary.

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

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.
November 26, 2025
Mico + more things

Mico – A vibrant new way to talk with Copilot | Product Hunt – Strategy wise I have mixed feelings about it. People are already anthropomorphising LLMs and the full impact of that is still yet to be understood – I don’t think its universally good. However, we’ve already got there with Mico as a character. I imagine that fluent objects like Mico does make services stickier.

In this respect Mico looks like the kind of moral trap Meta, Bytedance have fallen into on their social media platforms.

Then there is the Clippy trauma now encapsulated as a drop of fleum – but that’s age bracketed so likely means nothing to younger cohorts.

On the other hand from a marketing effectiveness perspective, if Microsoft use Mico in brand advertising it might work well as a fluent object and boost their brand building performance. Reminded me a lot of British Gas’ Willo the Wisp character.

Business

The Pulse: Amazon layoffs – AI or economy to blame? – The Pragmatic Engineer

China

A Proud Superpower Answers to No One – by Ryan Fedasiuk – interesting mix of inward-looking and hubris.

The Loop: How American Profits Built Chinese Power

Consumer behaviour

Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time | Psychology | The Guardian

The Lonely New Vices of American Life – The Atlantic – Booze is down and weed is up, and that’s doing something to Americans as a nation.

Culture

Keep the Faith: Inside the modern northern soul revival | Farout magazine – I remember going to Northern Soul nights at the 100 Club on Oxford Street several years ago. Like house, it never disappeared it just went underground.

Finance

Sam Altman says OpenAI is not ‘trying to become too big to fail’ | FT and Sam Altman’s pants are totally on fire – by Gary Marcus

FMCG

Huggies maker Kimberly-Clark to buy Tylenol maker Kenvue for $40 billion | Axios

Gadgets

Moflin | CASIO – an LLM-powered answer to the Furby of the dot com era

Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s slumping commercial property market lures savvy tycoon-linked buyer | South China Morning Post – Savvy investors, including a buyer of a floor at Opus in Mid-Levels who is connected to the family of a Cambodian Chinese tycoon, are pouncing on Hong Kong’s slumping commercial property market to snap up bargains.

The 12th floor of 18 On Lan Street, a Ginza-style commercial building in Central, was handed over to Surplus Inc for HK$34 million (US$4.4 million) on Friday, according to Land Registry records. That represented a 65 per cent loss for the previous owner, Zhou Shubo, who bought the floor for HK$96 million in 2013.

Kanika Sam Ang was a director at Surplus, according to Companies Registry data. Sam Ang has been associated with the family of tycoon Tony Tandijono, who owns Cambodia-based President Airlines, Phnom Penh casino Holiday Palace and a travel agency in Hong Kong.

Ideas

Dubai Chocolate Gives the UAE a Taste of Genuine Soft Power | TIME

The Prophet of the Stateless Age: What Ian Angell Saw Coming

Innovation

New drivetrain technology for off-road vehicles moves safely in difficult terrain | TechXplore

Sweden, Ukraine to develop new weapons together | Spacewar

Japan

Japan Public Markets Under Attack – by Jesper Koll

Sony launches cheaper Japan-only PlayStation 5 console

Luxury

Inside Burberry’s lost year — and the battle to bring back its magic | Dark Luxury

Materials

Good vibrations: Ceramic material harvests electricity from waste energy | TechXplore

Media

Major Porn Studios Join Forces to Establish Industry ‘Code of Conduct’ | 404 Media – Adult Studio Alliance is founded by major porn companies including Aylo, Dorcel, ERIKALUST, Gamma Entertainment, Mile High Media and Ricky’s Room, and establishes a code of conduct for studios.

ReelShort and More: The Microdrama TV Series Gold Rush Is Here | Hollywood Reporter – following the Chinese media industry

Online

Gen Z Men So Scared of Getting Filmed They’ve Stopped Dating | Rolling Stone – It ends up fueling mistrust in many young men and can turn interactions into battlegrounds where boys feel they must protect their egos. Over time, empathy can go away and suspicion takes its place. Instead of feeling comfortable being genuine, sometimes they second-guess every word or message, wondering how it might be judged, shared, or mocked. But then it takes a turn and that’s why young men may retreat into online spaces that confirm the suspicions they have and help to reinforce negative stereotypes about girls. This causes a Cold War among genders where each side is suspicious of each other and doesn’t have empathy. In these divided spaces, interactions become games of defensive accusation and people grow untrustworthy of one another. – Failing is part of success and of life

Perplexity strikes multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images | TechCrunch

Ritson: Despite Snoop and Katy, Menulog’s collapse was inevitable – Mumbrella

Security

Theft Bisect – via Matt Muir ‘This exists because, seemingly, the Met Police are too dumb to make this themselves’ – you can read an explanation as to the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ behind its existence here, but generally this is just a smart idea, simply-executed.‘

Iridium develops compact chip for robust global GPS protection | Space Daily

CCP Wartime Decisionmaking | ChinaTalk

Australian spy chief accuses China of IP theft and meddling; experts say remarks reflect certain Australian officials’ attempt to mislead public – Global Times – An Australian spy chief on Tuesday accused Chinese security services of large scale IP theft and political meddling and said China failed to understand how their Western counterparts operate. The remarks came on the heels of comments by Australia’s Defense Minister Richard Marles, who hyped up China’s “military build-up.”

Chinese experts criticised the series of statements, saying they reflect some Australia politicians’ anxiety and bias toward China’s technological and military progress. Moreover, they said the spy chief’s remarks reveal an arrogance rooted in the belief that Western political system is superior – Global Times is a Chinese government published newspaper.

Software

ChatEurope – slow and would have been ok a few years ago

Nvidia faces Washington heat over alleged Huawei ties | DigiTimes – US lawmakers are ramping up scrutiny of China’s AI and semiconductor sectors, tightening oversight from corporate ties to capital flows to reinforce Washington’s edge in the global AI competition.

Mozilla announces an AI ‘window’ for Firefox | The Verge

$) Kimi Kimi on the Wall – by Kevin Xu – Interconnected

Taiwan

Mainland Chinese police offer cash rewards for tips on Taiwan’s ‘terrible’ influencers | South China Morning Post – trying to influence Taiwan influencer discussions

Technology

Microsoft CEO says the company doesn’t have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory – ‘you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in’ | Tom’s Hardware and Investors need to look beyond the ‘bragawatts’ in AI infrastructure boom | FT

Why Value Outlasts Valuation – On my Om

Web-of-no-web

Waymo In The Fast Lane | The future party – Waymo now allowed on select freeways in the US

November 16, 2025
Sixt Halloween ad + more stuff

Sixt Halloween ad combines a Stranger Things aesthetic with a hard-hitting competition comparison at the core of the creative. I would put money on it that the production leaned heavily on generative AI. I’ve used Sixt previously and they were ok as a car rental company, they won my business many on price and location of their pick-up points for vehicles. It will be interesting if they can build this Halloween execution into a wider ongoing brand building campaign that turns Sixt into a car rental juggernaut.

How QRcode payments took off in India?

UX commentator Phoebe Yu did a really good video exploring why QRcode based payments took off in India. India has learned from and adopted some of the O2O experience in China and used it in a different context.

Jeep Grand Wagoneer ‘The Family’ advert

On one hand given how the current US administration relies on the support of the religious white, this advert is brave. I am also amazed they managed to hang a 3-minute film from one statement in a car review by Jalopnik.

All the best people are dogs

Life 360 have built a campaign around a banger of a human insight that all dog owners know. Their dog always owns a good deal of their human’s mental real estate, by latching on to that space Life 360 were looking to cut through Apple AirTag’s fame in the space.

Great ideas start on a Mac

There are several Apple films that I could have put up here. Aside from great craft, all these films have one other thing in common – too little media spend to actually get them seen by a relevant audience.

Keep thinking with Claude

Anthropic have come with a great brand anthem of a film. While it may have been produced with LLM generated video, it also shows the very human feature of great taste behind it. All of which fits into the idea of AI as collaborator.

November 8, 2025
Tahoe + more things
Tahoe

Another year, another macOS. Tahoe is sensibly unambitious but it has raised some ire amongst Mac users. You can tell how unambitious Tahoe was, when CNET had to do an article showing you how common app icons have changed because you otherwise probably didn’t notice. I know I didn’t.

Tahoe is neither here nor there as a release for me. I haven’t found features that are ‘can’t live without”. The app interface changes feel different for the sake of being different, but I quickly got used to them.

In terms of quality it still feels a bit ‘beta’-ish but I hope that the bugs get ironed out over time.
- The pop-up window to select my accent over the ‘o’ in my given name gets blanked out for some reason.
- When performing certain actions, the browser chrome all turns white.
Otherwise things have been fine so far. My anti-virus of choice launched an update soon after Tahoe came out. As has my VPN client and numerous utilities and apps that I use for work, or just keeping my Mac tuned up.

I have a Brother mono laser printer to connect up, (as my long-suffering HP unit finally gave up the ghost after a decade of service,) which might be a bit of a trial if Reddit is anything to judge by.

Last Week on My Mac: Tahoe’s elephant – The Eclectic Light Company – this critique points out the kind of issues with Tahoe that implies it isn’t the Macintosh operating system of Steve Jobs with its historic focus on art principles and typography right from the beginning.

China

From ‘guochao’ to ‘zìxìn’: China’s new era of cultural confidence | Jing Daily

Why anti-involution feels anti-Chinese? | Following the Yuan

Dutch seizure of chipmaker followed US ultimatum over Chinese chief | FT – the judgement paints a bit more of a nuanced picture with two independent actions. It also explicitly states that the government order is not final yet (and at that point would still be open to appeals). The actual matter involved is a (significant) breach of fiduciary duty by Zhang Xuezheng and the holding company (Yuching). Cited issues were:
- Placing of orders to another Wingtech subsidiary in China (that is in financial trouble) far exceeding demand (such that the expectation is that a significant share of the stock would need to be scrapped as it would not be able to be used in time)
- Replacing 3 people with banking authority (including the CFO) with 3 other people, without financial background, one not an employee of Nexperia at all. All in the context where urgent US sanctions mean that independence from China is important for continued operations of the company. The court called this “Voor een onderneming van de orde van grootte van Nexperia grenst een dergelijke handelswijze aan roekeloosheid” (“For a company in the order of size of Nexerperia these actions border on being reckless”).
- For the replacement no motivation was provided, prompting the chief financial officer and the chief legal officer from their own fiduciary duties as directors to object (and also to ask the court to investigate/intervene)
- Stated intent to dismiss existing directors (without motivation) or asking for mandatory consultation from the workers council.
As to the decisions:
- Suspension of Xuezheng as director/CEO
- Temporary appointment of a new non-executive director (with power to make final decisions)
- Place all (except 1) share under management/safekeeping with a lawyer
- This all motivated by (very) signifcant breach of the fiduciary duty, not based upon an Dutch government action. The application of the Entity list on Nexperia as subsidiary was a significant contextual driver though (as in the duty to minimize corporate risks).
Consumer behaviour

Piper Sandler Completes 50th Semi-Annual Teen Survey | Piper Sandler – teen spending down 6 percent compared to last year. Another point was that Dr Pepper was their favourite drink ahead of Coca-Cola, which makes this activist investor’s interest even more salient: tarboard builds stake in Keurig Dr Pepper after unpopular Peet’s deal | FT

Economics

UK risks higher inflation becoming entrenched, IMF warns | FT

Health

Mirador fundraising raises hopes of revival in US biotech market | FT

Ideas

Everything Is Television – Derek Thompson

Japan

Anime activism – Matt Alt’s Pure Invention – I didn’t realise that in 1978 the president Marcos of the Philippines had banned a whole genre of anime (giant robots or mecha) due to the influence of Voltes V on Filipino student activists.

Marketing

Post | LinkedIn – The Future of Brand Building Begins Where Commerce Meets Creativity. – or P&G applying the radio soap opera format to the 21st century

Stopping agency burnout: the fight against ‘insidious’ work cultures and ‘inaccurate’ timesheets – Campaign found a long-hours culture continues to exist in adland, with pitching, client demands and poor role-modelling by managers part of the equation.

In the current climate of staff cuts, lingering threats of AI replacing the workforce and agencies dealing with economic constraints, late working – and the chance of burnout – continues to be a risk.

Shrinking teams can potentially lead to more demands being placed on remaining employees. WPP and Interpublic each cut thousands of staff from their global workforces in the first half of 2025, on top of headcount reductions in 2024. Last year, the collective global headcount across the “big six” holding companies declined by 1.6%, the first fall since the post-pandemic rebuild.

WPP boosts AI marketing with $400mn Google deal | FT – I would be concerned if they weren’t using video generators like Veo and Google Gemini – which does make me wonder what Mark Read was up to?

On the importance of good strategic writing in using AI: AI interfaces and the role of good writing | by Nick DiLallo | Oct, 2025 | UX Collective

Media

Apple sued over use of copyrighted books to train Apple Intelligence | Yahoo! News

Google designated with “strategic market status” by UK Competition and Markets Authority – The Media Leader

Exclusive | Advertisers Push Big Tech to Adopt Standards for Transparency in Ad Sales – WSJ

How We Automated Content Marketing to Acquire Users at Scale | Spotify Engineering – Insightful blog post from Spotify’s ML team: they implemented their own pre-ranking algorithm to select the best ad variants to deploy to their advertising channels in their user acquisition campaigns.

Spotify’s marketing team developed a creative production pipeline that could generate and deploy ad creatives to marketing channels based on listening habits in a geographic region. The problem they encountered was that they were generating creatives from a high-cardinality dataset, and the number of variations they were uploading to their channels was overwhelming those channels’ ability to optimize ads effectively.

Spotify’s solution was to build a pre-ranking algorithm using XGBoost that would determine which creatives to upload to the channels. Their ML pre-ranking model outperformed a simple heuristic model, with 4%-14% lower CPRs and 11%-12% higher CTRs. The ML model utilized a rich set of features to predict sub_percentage (the percentage of contributed subscriptions from the artist) and relative_cps_ratio (the share of the artist’s cost per subscription in the marketing campaign) for premium subscriptions, whereas the heuristic model used three fixed features. The model is retrained daily based on a defined lookback window.

Moreover, although this was deployed before ATT, the team found that ATT didn’t impact its performance, as training relied on aggregated data.

This obviously remains a relevant issue as advertisers scale the volume of their creative production through generative tools. While this pre-dates Meta’s Andromeda initiative for pre-ranking, it’s still likely relevant for most other channels (and, depending on the volume of creative uploaded, Meta).

Perplexity Pauses New Advertising Deals to Reassess Ambitions | AdWeek – brands are rethinking how to spend their budgets. Chan said many advertisers are moving away from performance-focused, traditional search and towards top-of-funnel brand awareness—an area Perplexity may pursue down the line.

Online

US Amazon Prime Membership Finally Hits 200 Million | CIRP – Amazon Prime finally hit the 200-million-member mark in the US, after several quarters of slow, but steady growth toward that milestone.

Note: CIRP estimates the number of individual Amazon shoppers who use Amazon Prime. That includes multiple family members for many subscribers, so this estimate is higher than the number of US households that pay for an Amazon Prime membership.

Amazon knows the difference between Prime shoppers and paid Prime member households, so as US Prime membership approaches its limit, there may be a growing focus on bringing those numbers closer together. Amazon does not want to reduce the number of Amazon Prime membership users, but it certainly would not mind having more paid memberships associated with them. We expect Amazon to continue its efforts to attract members by emphasizing the benefits of Prime, rather than policing shopping and limiting Prime membership sharing.

CIRP estimates 200 million US Amazon customers had a Prime membership as of the September 2025 quarter. That is an increase of about 6% from 189 million US Amazon Prime members in the September 2024 quarter and up very slightly from our 198 million member estimate last quarter.

Retailing

Why Did Walmart Just Buy a Shopping Mall? – The New York Times – reminds me of the local mini-shops that used to be inside Kwik Saves in many towns

Technology

China’s ‘Darwin Monkey’ is the world’s largest brain-inspired supercomputer | Live Science

I had been having lunch in the Google canteen with colleagues, and then came back to my desk, checked an email newsletter and this arrived: Smartphone-powered AI predicts avocado ripeness | Newsroom | Oregon State University

Web of no web

Palmer Luckey’s Anduril launches EagleEye military helmet with help from buddy Zuck | The Verge

Amazon launches Echo devices designed for Alexa+ | Amazon
October 25, 2025