Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

December 2023 newsletter
December 2023 newsletter introduction

I put the December 2023 newsletter together early because I know how December goes.

It used to be that Christmas parties and a gradual disappearance of clients and colleagues meant that the month effectively ended on December 15.

Christmas card from the old Adidas Originals boutique on Newburgh Street (as I write this the store is now occupied by Ralph Lauren’s RRL brand

In recent years all that went out the window. Clients called pitches for early January, which meant working up to and over the Christmas period. New projects came in that absolutely, positively had to have a first round of creative for the first week in January.

Whatever the holiday season throws at you, and whatever your favourite festival of choice to celebrate it is called. Have a great one! (Here’s a soundtrack for the vibes.)

Being thankful.

A good deal of December is about being thankful. The people and things that I am being thankful for (a by no means complete list).Things and people that I am being thankful for (a by no means complete list).
- My strategy brethren: Parrus Doshi, Lee Menzies-Pearson, Sarath Koka, Colleen Merwick, Maureen Garo, Conall Jackson, Alice Yessouroun, Makeila Saka, Zoe Healey and Calvin Wong
- Client services and creative partners who were in the thick of it: Greg Barter, Francisco Javier Galindo Aragoncillo, Anthony Welch, Ian Crocombe, Leanne Ainsworth, Stephen Holmes and Noel Wong
- Other smart people in the industry: Stephen Potts, Jeremy Brown, Darren Cairns, Robin Dhara, Martin Shellaker and Lisa Gills
- Things: WARC, the IPA
With that done, let’s get into the December 2023 newsletter!

Things I’ve written.
- Thinking about listening pleasure and the amount of factors that affect how we listen to music.
- Omakase – how a personalised experience migrated from high end Japanese sushi restaurant to reinvent food and beverage practice in Korea. What is it likely to mean for the rest of us?
- Beep – time, time signals and changing consumer behaviour.
- Soft girls and slackers – why generational dropout is likely to be a fiction and the true picture of how engaged we all are at work.
Books that I have read.

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis posits that Europe has already moved to a post-capitalist (and post-political) technofeudalist state where technology platforms are the defacto rulers. Varoufakis is more important in the way his book will likely influence future regulation and digital policy than as an analysis of the current zeitgeist per se. His viewpoint on the rentier economics of technology platform businesses is shared by other thinkers and academics including Lina M. Khan of the US. Federal Trade Commission.

Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements by Mary Buffett and David Clark. What I would have given for this book when I was studying my finance module in the first year of college. Buffett and Clark break down a bit of the history of Warren Buffett and what to look for on financial statements of publicly listed companies in a very homespun style. I don’t know if it’s a deliberate effect but even the cutting of the thicker than normal pages and inconsistent printing adds to its homespun feel.

Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy by Harry Farrell and Abraham Newman and Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror by Robert Young Pelton. Both of these books were recommended by friends directly involved at one time or another in GWoT – the global war on terror.

Licensed to Kill reminded me of Kipling’s portrayal of ordinary British soldiers in India. Their stories were never told by the historians. It is a similar state today with the contractors that serve in the conflict. There is at least one example where they are whitewashed out of a story in real-time by the US military, who instead gave credit elsewhere in their press statements. It’s fascinating and hugely dispiriting all at the same time.

The surprise for me was that the US reliance on contractors didn’t go back to the first Gulf War, but all the way to Vietnam where oilfield services and engineering contractor Brown and Root were responsible for 85% of the infrastructure deployed. Something I’d never seen mentioned before.

Underground Empire focuses on how financial and trade measures were used by the United States during the conflict and since. My main criticism of the book would be its singular focus on the US, whereas we have also seen these tools used by the European Union, China and Russia in more recent times – with varying degrees of success.

Things I have been inspired by.

The power of nostalgia is constantly underestimated in brand marketing. It’s why you remember ads and jingles decades later – the ‘long’ of The Long and The Short of It. Nothing is more wrapped into nostalgia than what marketers call ‘moments. Christmas is a classic example of a ‘moment’. Christmas in the Carroll household means working with my Dad to get his electro-mechanical control unit and Christmas tree lights down from the attic and carefully assembled in the front room. These lights are old, filament bulbs. Amazon’s plethora of LED lights for the tree mean that you no longer have the opportunity for training in zen-like patience on a December afternoon; checking and replacing each bulb that was blown in order to get the lights to work. Each year my Dad’s tobacco tin of spare bulbs gets precipitously closer to empty.

The tree itself was proudly made in Hong Kong sometime in the late 1960s or very early 1970s with authentic looking plastic pine needles held on branches of tightly wound wire about as thick as a coat hanger, held upright by an ancient plastic-legged tripod. The mechanism to run it is something my Dad cobbled together soon after buying the tree. The lights are wired into a giant disc of metal contact and a former radar motor swings around an armature to activate each contact in turn. All of this is held on a stout board that also has a circuit with a dully glowing bulb to provide resistance. The heat given off by the board and the dull light in a darkened room when it’s going is a reasonable substitute for an open fire in the smokeless zone where my parents live.

The smell of carbon bushes burning and old electrical products warming up is as much Christmas to me as cinnamon or an Old Spice gift set.

Once everything is running optimally it is covered in fibreboard boxes that are still wrapped in unblemished vibrant kitsch 1970s Christmas paper.

Another element of Christmas in the Carroll household is Jim Reeves’ 12 Songs of Christmas album that my parents have on repeat from December 1st onwards.

I took a trip down to the Young V&A museum in Bethnal Green to see their Japan: Myths to Manga exhibition. It’s designed for little people but delightfully curated.

Sailor Moon drawings from the animation cells

This month, I have been mostly listening to Patten’s second album alongside all the Christmas music. Patten uses AI created samples as his instruments on his tracks. His first album using this technique Mirage.FM reminded me of early 1980s techno in terms of its avant garde, at times discordant sound and tempo. The latest album Deep Blue feels much more organic, closer to hard bop jazz.

I was inspired by an end of year wrap-up by the folks at Superheroic AI on the leading edge of creative tools, which will feed into something I will drop in the new year.

McSweeney’s reimagined Spotify (and last.fm‘s) end of year recaps as if WebMD had done it…

But Ged, why no Christmas adverts?

By this time of the month, I am over Christmas adverts already, instead here’s a vintage clip from the Republic of Telly that explores some of the tropes of Christmas ads. I suspect that this was strongly influenced by campaigns mobile phone network Three Ireland had run over a number of years, but neatly skewers the cliches in much of Ireland’s adverts that come to focus on family members who can’t come home.

RTÉ television

Ok, ok, I will give you a Christmas ad, just not one of the ones that you’re expecting. In Japan, Christmas is when people eat KFC (this is down to KFC’s first Japanese franchisee marketing to expats looking for a turkey substitute on Christmas in the 1970s, which then became a wider thing in Japanese society). It is also a kind of mid-winter version of Valentine’s Day since it’s not bound by its western context. Which is why Sky condoms dropped this advert below. Thankfully there is no awkward fumbling with a drunk colleague in the stationery cupboard in the advert.

Going beyond Christmas and into 2024, Trendwatching have created an interactive web page outlining 15 industry-specific trends and 45 innovations related to the trends. Worthwhile going through for thought-starters, more here.

Things I have watched.

It’s cold and dark and I make no apology for my films being unapologetically escapist and and entertaining to try and counterweight the drab conditions.

Bosch Legacy season 2 – Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch is a great bit of casting and I have yet to tire of the Bosch series on Amazon Prime.. Part of this is down to Michael Connelly’s involvement, who has done a good job keeping the show in tune with his books. Season 2 is based on The Wrong Side of Goodbye and The Crossing. If you haven’t watched any of them start at the beginning with Bosch season 1 and work your way through to the Bosch Legacy series.

Reacher season two – I always found Tom Cruise’s adaption of the Jack Reacher books a bit odd. I liked watching him play opposite Werner Herzog, but Cruise wasn’t Reacher. In the Lee Childs books Jack Reacher’s a blond blue-eyed man mountain. He’s not a weirdly intense Napoleon-sized fragile soul – the very things that made Cruise fantastic in Magnolia. In the Amazon Prime series, that is not an issue because former teenage mutant ninja turtle Alan Ritchson fits Childs’ character to a tee and the character development is really well done. Season one was amazing and season two is off to a great start. This season is based on the book Bad Luck and Trouble.

The Lord of The Rings – I was in primary school when I first got to see this film. We’d just read The Hobbit and aped around hall acting out part of The Lord of the Rings that we were reading in class. Ralph Bakshi’s animation of the first book and a half of LOTR amazed me with its mix of animated characters and rotoscoped backdrops.

Ralph Bakshi in his own way has been just as much a visionary as Walt Disney, he brought a ‘realism’ to his animation. Due to a dispute with the studio Bakshi refused to make the second part of this film which is a shame. When you get to see Peter Jackson’s trilogy, the first film in particular, draws on Bakshi’s work shot for shot in parts (as well as the famous BBC radio drama from 1981). I have enjoyed watching this regularly since, along with Bakshi’s other works: Wizards and Fire & Ice.

Useful tools.

TeuxDeux.

It’s hard to get a to do list that works for you. Trust me I have tried a number of them. What works for me may have variable mileage for you. I have been finding TeuxDeux working for me at the moment and it’s $36/year. Secondly, I like small software companies that are more invested in their software or service and won’t ‘sunset’ (that’s Silicon Valley-speak for shutting down a service) it at the drop of a hat like Google, Yahoo!, Meta etc.

EmbedResponsively.

An oldie but goodie, EmbedResponsively provides a simple service that allows you to put video on a page that will adapt to the viewing device.

FREEKey system

I needed keyrings for my parents that were easy to put keys on or off. My Mum isn’t particularly patient and a broken nail spurred my search for them. The Swedish designed FREEKey system of keyrings solved that problem.

Infogram

Infogram is a service that makes it easier to create data visualisations of different types that I have found useful over the past couple of weeks.

Control Panel for Twitter

Twitter is style annoyingly useful at times. I have got around the worst aspects of it through the use of lists of trusted accounts in certain areas. Control Panel for Twitter is a plug-in that rolls back some of the amendments that Twitter has undergone by Elon Musk.

In terms of my own post-Twitter active social channels, you can find on Mastodon and Bluesky. I am still recovering from the trauma of Pebble closing down as it had the best community of all the post-Twitter platforms.

Cyberduck

When I first started using Cyberduck, it was to access FTP servers for images and videos being transferred. Now it’s more about accessing cloud storage facilities such as Google Drive and Dropbox, without having to synch all the files on to my computer. It can even work with Egnyte within reason.

The sales pitch.

Now taking bookings for strategic engagements or open to discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done to date here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my December 2023 newsletter. Be excellent to each other, have a great Christmas and New Year, I look forward to seeing you back here in 2024. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. See you next month!
December 19, 2023
Soft girls and slackers
I read about soft girls, when a friend shared an article from Glamour magazine with me.

Glamour

Glamour is a women’s magazine published by Conde Nast. When it launched in the UK, it was famous for its ‘handbag format’ size, which then spurred innovation in the summer editions of men’s magazines. Nowadays it’s important for its beauty-led content. But it covers other aspects of wellness through to personal finance.

What is a soft girl?

Soft girl seems to be an extension of quiet quitting. Soft girls was considered to be an aspirational lifestyle. Soft girls are about the now, they don’t want a high-achieving high-flyer. Instead it about being in tune with herself: energy levels, her moods and her menstrual cycle. They’d like to live slowly, read books, artistic pursuits and making dinner for their partner or family.

Many working women can’t to go ‘full soft girl’ and quit working due to having bills to pay. Ultimately, it’s a sub-set of an idealised lifestyle shared on TikTok and Instagram by some women.

Why soft girl mattered?

I received the article wrapped in a critique:
- Soft girl lifestyle implies immense social privilege to live a life of leisure.
- It would put feminist achievements back decades.
- Sharing such content set a bad example for girls and teenagers.
- It was a social conservative version of Elysian fields for women who knew their place.
- It wasn’t a proper piece of journalism.
Like the gender neutral quiet quitting, it’s a rejection of the rat race at a time when the deck is stacked against workers. In this respect it’s rather similar to the story of generation X slackers who were dealing with Reagonomics and a jobs market devastated by globalisation and automation.

Why soft girls don’t actually matter.

The whole story is based on a central conceit – that cohorts of people, generations if you will are somehow unique and special. The reality is that doesn’t hold true as much as you think. We change as we go through life stages, but there is more that binds us than differentiates us from one and other.

In fact, generation based thinking and segments do more harm than good.

Group cohesion scores.

Group cohesion scores ( a measure of how much a given community holds a common set of values measured across 419 statements). In the UK population as a whole, the average majority opinion is held by 48.7% of the population. BBH looked at how generations scored on this measure and found that they differed from the overall population about +1.3, ‘gen-z’ cleaved even closer to the population norm with a difference of -0.2. Generations have no stronger connections to each other than the rest of the population.

Longitudinal patterns.

Remember when I talked earlier about the story of generation X opting out, instead choosing to hold down a McJob and becoming a slacker due to cynicism fuelled by Reaganomics, the cold war and poor employment prospects? It turns out that a Stanford research project found that the cynicism-fuelled life view was down to cross-generational increase in cynicism, rather than gen-Xers. However, the label stuck and marketers missed out on a valuable insight.

The Economist recently highlighted Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2023 Report. A survey that it uses to promote its corporate employment engagement practice to help business managers become effective coaches to their teams and use ‘science-based management’.

Gallup describes the survey as ‘the voice of the world’s employees’. In their introduction Gallup discuss how low engagement is costing the global economy about 9% of global GDP, because 59% of employees are ‘quietly quitting’. A further 18% were ‘loud quitting’ or actively disengaged from work. On those numbers alone, quiet quitting is cross-generational in nature.

And actively engaged employees have been increasing over the past decade and a half. This increase in work engagement came against a background of progressively increasing daily stress levels at work.

The most reliable indicators of engagement were whether the person was able to work remotely (high engagement) or in a workplace (lower engagement) and management (high) versus individual contributor (low). Women were slightly more engaged than men and age showed no difference.

Soft girls might be just a dreamy balm to get them through the daily grind.

More information

How young women are rejecting a girl boss culture for a life of leisure. | Glamour magazine

Don’t blame “quiet quitting” on Gen-Z | The Economist

Generation X not so special: Malaise, cynicism on the rise for all age groups | Stanford News Service
December 16, 2023
Beep
In Canada, as with other countries a beep electronic sound punctuated the correct time. In Canada, this is called the long dash because of its extended tone. In the UK and Ireland I have heard it called the ‘pips‘ three short beeps instead.

Consistency and precision

Before we had precise time mediated by a beep; consistency was still important. The time was marked in different ways:
- Church bells
- Farm estate clocks
- Railway station clocks
- Factory sirens
While this time would be consistent on a daily or weekly cycle, it gradually became apparent that it could differ from one town to another. Accurate time was crucial for mariners looking to gain an understanding of how east or west they were – their position in terms of longitude . You compare the position of the sun in the sky, how far it is on its access at midday GMT time and then back calculate your position. But marine chronometers were not commonplace onshore.

Half a century after the development of the chronometer, George Stephenson’s work developing the steam locomotive started what we now think of as railways and the Bessemer steel process allowed for mass production of railway tracks. Railway timetables were the point at which widespread consistency and precision were needed, with a country (or at least a time zone in the case of large countries like Russia, Canada and the United States) having a common time.

Radio

Radio programmes carrying some sort of time signals allowed a country to use watches and clocks that weren’t chronometer accurate that could be periodically compared and reset against the beep of the time signal.

The delay in propagating a time signal in most countries was not meaningful. The beep also featured on speaking clock services where a caller could dial in to a telephone line at a time of their choosing to receive the precise time to the second, every ten seconds. BT still provides the service in the UK. They are used less frequently with the rise of quartz watches, mobile phones and computers.

The Angelus

In Ireland, Roman Catholic heritage combined with the need for a time signal meant that the bells were rung on TV and radio at 12 noon and 6pm for The Angelus. When the Angelus started on the radio, Roman Catholic households would be able to mutter the prayer to themselves. Having it on the radio also served a socio-political purpose as well as a time marking purpose in the Ireland of Eamon DeValera where piousness was a key part of the Irish identity the young country looked to foster.

Modern Ireland, particularly in the urban areas is a very different, more diverse Ireland than the rural-dominated Ireland of DeValera

RTÉ aside

Before Ireland went to a 24 hour broadcast schedule on RTÉ radio 1, the station turned on at 5:30am with an electronically created interval signal that was a more tuneful version of the beep.

This repeated at regular intervals until 6am when the announcer would the start of programming. It often marked my time to get up for my milk round or shift work.

It still appears at the same time, announcing the transition of overnight programming shared with RTÉ Gold to radio one’s first programme of the day Rising Time.

Technology systems

Accuracy was improved by the invention of the first atomic clock in 1955. This built on theoretical work that had been done from the 1930s onwards in the area of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices. By the mid-1960s Hewlett-Packard were building 19″ rack mountable atomic clocks, eventually it became small enough to squeeze on a satellite. By 2004, researchers had built an atomic clock mechanism the size of a coffee bean.

Atomic clock time codes are a crucial part of global positioning satellite signals. Mobile operators have used these. Then there are several radio stations around the world on shortwave and long wave transmitters who send out a regular time code. These timecodes are used to correct clocks and watches including Casio watches with the ‘Multiband 6 feature‘.

Prior to widespread adoption of the internet, computer network workstations, be they Mac or PC would have different times on them, usually set by the user or the system administrator at the computer. While mobile phone networks could distribute accurate time signals to mobile phones, they often didn’t. Some networks supported the summer time transfer, others didn’t.

The internet and workstation grade PC operating systems provided an opportunity for widespread use of network time protocol servers. Sudden your Mac and later on your iPhone and iPad would all have the same time.

Internet time problems

The internet, while providing a format for distributing relatively accurate time to machines has presented its own problem propagating time to humans. There can be a substantial amount of time difference between different ways of receiving broadcast content. The difference is most apparent between internet streaming and terrestrial broadcast radio and television. A good deal of this is down to the nature of best effort packet networks that support the modern web. Video and audio are buffered to provide a seamless experience rather than a precise experience. So time signals on IPTV and audio streamed radio are indicative at best rather than having precision.
December 14, 2023
Jeremy Deller + more stuff
Jeremy Deller

Jeremy Deller is famous for examining 1980s events from the MIner’s strike to rave culture. Most notably his work Acid Brass, working with the William Fairey Brass Band on cover versions of early house and techno music. In this documentary he walks a group of sixth formers through the context that rave culture began in.

Jeremy Deller has hosted a reenactment of the Battle Of Orgreave and made an inflatable version of Stonehenge in a piece called Sacrilege.

Jacobs cream crackers

As a child, I would have eaten several cream crackers manufactured on this line. In more recent times the production of Jacobs products were moved abroad for cost cutting reasons. There is something mesmerising about watching the process of production.

Cyberpunk

Quinn’s Ideas exploration of Neuromancer pointed out some links that I hadn’t realised in the formation of cyberpunk as a genre and cultural force.

LA Noir

Why film noir happened when it did, and why it is so synonymous with the city of Los Angeles is explained in this documentary which features an interview with author James Eilroy.

EDC

Everyday Carry (EDC) – whilst having evolved as an online cultural phenomenon has been around for as along as men and boys have had pockets. My childhood friend Nigel was obsessing about Swiss Army knives and really small Leica binoculars back when I was in primary school. His Dad was a well-to-do dentist and Nigel fulfilled his EDC goals before coming a teen. It was only natural that it eventually became a thing when the internet came around. Kevin Kelly had been talking about cool tools on the the web for the past quarter of a century; Drop.com when it was founded over 12 years ago covered products that would be considered EDC today.

All of which leaves me more puzzled why EDC has sudden become the focus of media attention in the quality newspapers.
Tacit and explicit knowledge

Vicky Zhao’s content are handy thought starters for presentations and problem solving. I particularly enjoyed this one on tacit knowledge.
December 7, 2023
November 2023 newsletter – fourth time unlucky?
November 2023 newsletter introduction

You’re still reading? Great! Welcome to my November 2023 newsletter which marks my 4th issue.

I am not excessively superstitious – but living in Hong Kong rubbed off a bit on me.

I developed a love of milk tea, found the ‘hit women’ cathartic and am still leery of the number 4.

The number 4 is considered unlucky. In Hong Kong buildings, there is no fourth floor – in a similar way to their being no 13th floor in the UK high rise and office blocks. So I hope that this fourth issue doesn’t bring misfortune.

The clocks have gone back and the sun rises reluctantly over the horizon every morning, disappearing earlier each afternoon, but that doesn’t mean that inspiration stops. And it will be Christmas before you know it.

New reader?

If is your first time reading, welcome to my November 2023 newsletter! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.
- Dimensions of Luxury based on a mix of stuff that I have read from Sense Worldwide, Horizon Catalyst and books on luxury trends.
- Every wondered why its dot com rather than full-stop com? So did I.
- Analysis on IPSOS research on the value to brands of reputation.
- MCN – multi-channel networks. A business type popular in China and Japan is taking a record label approach to a stable of influencers.
- A little bit about the Whole Earth Catalogue and more things.
- The Brand Vandals conversation – reflecting back on a conversation I had in 2012 with Wadds that became part his book Brand Vandals.
Books that I have read.
- Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future by Ed Conway. Prior to working in advertising, I had a background in manufacturing and consider myself reasonably well read, but some of the material in Conway’s book was completely new to me. Its narrative approach reminds me of the vintage TV documentary series Connections presented by James Burke, that can be found on YouTube.
- Beyond Disruption by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. This book looked at non-disruptive innovation. This is diametrically opposed to the way innovation is discussed in Silicon Valley and the mainstream media. More on my view of it here.
- The New Working Class by Claire Ainsley. In the advertising industry, we have an acute perception that we might not understand life outside the M25 as we think we do. I thankfully have friends and family in the North to keep me somewhat grounded from the metropolitan elite lifestyle that I lead. Until I read this book, I didn’t realise how grounded the advertising industry was compared to our counterparts in national politics. That this book had to be written is a damning indictment of how out of touch politicos actually are.
Things I have been inspired by.

Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook project – Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s open-access collection of e-books. Via Matt’s Webcurios newsletter.

IPSOS research video seminar on Unlocking The Value of Reputation. This is the closest I have seen to making the case for earned media activities. The full whitepaper is available here. Thanks to Stuart Bruce for the link!

My friend Ian recommended the Honest Broker newsletter to me and I have found it to be a great read alongside my long time subscription to Bill Bishop’s Sinocism.

DDB Remedy’s meta analysis of marketing science work and academic scientific research on how emotion work for effective campaigns. How The Unexpected and Emotion Work to Influence Behaviour Change – focuses on how surprise when paired with emotion led creative had an increased impact. It all makes sense when you think about the power of salience and distinctiveness in communications; but it’s great to see that someone has drawn the multi-disciplinary research together in a cogent argument.

SEMRush have published a report for 2024 trends in social media platforms: The Vision in a Social Era that is worth downloading and pillaging for ideas that can be sold into clients.

I don’t know if inspired was the right term to use but I noticed 2023 Girlguiding Girl’s Attitudes survey thanks to a former colleague of mine from the start of my agency career. This is a survey that the Girlguiding movement has run over 15 years. Having freelanced on Dove’s ‘Real Beauty‘ campaign back in the day, this one statistic stood out to me.

If I were the Dove UK brand director at Unilever, this chart would be pinned to my wall or have it as my laptop wallpaper. You can read the full survey here.

It isn’t just a UK problem as this article on American teens gives more food for thought: What It’s Like to Be a 13-Year-Old Girl Today – The New York Times. It will be interesting to see if the Nike x Dove Body Confidence initiative makes a difference.

DeBeers is returning to its ‘A Diamond Is Forever’ campaign. The print campaign image is beautiful with a great use of negative space. DeBeers is spending 20 million dollars on media in the US in China. In the US, I think this makes total sense.

DeBeers

I don’t know how well it will work in China? There isn’t the mental model built up in west over decades around the campaign theme. While the wealthy in China realise that diamonds are recognised as a store of wealth – the guo chao mindset may see gold (and possibly jade) jewellery favoured by at least some younger consumers.

This has been exacerbated by a decline in the number of marriages by just under 11% and a trend to prefer gold has an 18% reduction in diamonds sold in China over the past 12 months. In the meantime the sale of gold has risen by 12%.

I look forward to seeing how the campaign goes.

According to Numerator, online retail platforms will be the big winners from Christmas shopping. The news for the food and beverage services sector isn’t so great.

Finally ‘Knowledge is Power with Kidney Disease took me back to 1988. Rob Base has remade It Takes Two for Bohringer Ingelheim in the US to highlight the linkage between kidney disease and type two diabetes. The message is poignant as Base’s creative partner DJ EZ Rock died in 2014 and suffered from diabetes.

Producer DJ EZ Rock was responsible for the hype backing track based around Lynn Collins ‘Think (about it)’ and backing vocals from Rhonda Parris. (Parris has a short-lived recording career, releasing just one solo single No, No Love – a bit of a proto-House banger heavily influenced by freestyle if you like that kind of thing). Those that knew also had the Derek B remix of It Takes Two, with a heavy kick drum underpinning from a Roland TR-808 drum machine.

Things I have watched.

It’s cold and dark and I make no apology for my films being unapologetically escapist and and entertaining to try and counterweight the drab conditions. I do have some standards through and got material for this November 2023 newsletter.
- Zerozer ozero – follows a single drug deal between the Mexican cartel and the ’Ndrangheta. However things don’t go according to plan, so as the conspiracy unfolds we get a walk through the international drug trafficking trade across Latin America, Africa and Europe. This was done as a limited series, but I watched it as a boxset. It is directed by Stefano Sollima who did the Sicario films and Subarra.
- Novembre – A French fictional dramatisation of the government response to coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris at Stade de France and the Bataclan concert venue through to the Saint Dennis raid that resulted in the death of police dog Diesel, which trended on social media with the #jesuisdiesel hashtag. Jean Dujardin shows the range of his ability as an actor from the comedy of his OSS117 film series, to the deadly seriousness of this film.
- Diva – I originally watched Diva as part of the Moviedrome series of curated films introduced by Alex Cox. At the time Cox personally disliked the film due to it being ‘a film of style’ rather than narrative. I loved it and revisited it on Blu-Ray. It was sharper and I got to appreciate the Vladimir Cosma soundtrack with its mix of opera, classical music and avant-garde compositions.
Alex Cox’s introduction to Diva for the much missed Moviedrome film seasons that used to run on BBC 2.
- The Continental – Amazon Prime Video has some great tentpole content and The Continental adds to this. It’s a prequel of sorts to the John Wick universe and starts with a beautifully made feature length pilot. The action would find it hard to live up to the John Wick films, but the impeccable soundtrack manages to surpass them. The alternative past New York of the film has similar vibes to shows like Pennyworth and Gotham.
Useful tools

Better Miro, Mural or Figjam alternative

I have started using Milanote as an alternative to Miro for personal projects. Like Miro it has a mix of templates to get you started. There is an iPhone app and a native Mac app, so you don’t have to rely on running resource hungry pages in your internet browser of choice. It might even replace Omnigraffle in my personal software stack for some of the tasks that I do.

The sales pitch.

It was great to collaborate this month with my Hong Kong and Shanghai-based friends at Craft Associates on a prospective exciting new project. Now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my November 2023 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
November 29, 2023