Category: japan |日本 | 일본

Yōkoso – welcome to the Japan category of this blog. This blog was inspired by my love of Japanese culture and their consumer trends. I was introduced to chambara films thanks to being a fan of Sergio Leone’s dollars trilogy. A Fistful of Dollars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

Getting to watch Akira and Ghost In The Shell for the first time were seminal moments in my life. I was fortunate to have lived in Liverpool when the 051 was an arthouse cinema and later on going to the BFI in London on a regular basis.

Today this is where I share anything that relates to Japan, business issues, the Japanese people or culture. Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Lawson launched a new brand collaboration with Nissan to sell a special edition Nissan Skyline GT-R. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as Japan.

There is a lot of Japan-related content here. Japanese culture was one of odd the original inspirations for this blog hence my reference to chambara films in the blog name.

I don’t tend to comment on local politics because I don’t understand it that well, but I am interested when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.

If there are any Japanese related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

Layers of the future
This post about layers of the future was inspired by an article that I read in the EE News. The article headline talked in absolutes: The external power adapter Is dead. The reality is usually much more complex. The future doesn’t arrive complete; instead we have layers of the future.

Science fiction as an indicator.

The 1936 adaption by Alexander Korda of HG Wells The Shape of Things To Come shows a shiny complete new utopia. It is a tour-de-force of art deco design, but loses somewhat in believability because of its complete vision.

https://youtu.be/knOd-BhRuCE?si=HfIDYsaa7nUZKrYE

This is partly explained away by a devastating war, largely influenced by the Great War which had demonstrated the horrendous power of artillery and machine guns. The implication being that the layers of architecture assembled over the years had been literally blown away. So architects and town planners would be working from a metaphorical clean sheet, if you ignore land ownership rights, extensive rubble, legacy building foundations and underground ground works like water pipes, sewers, storm drains and cable ducting.

In real-life, things aren’t that simple. Britain’s major cities were extensively bombed during the war. The country went under extensive rebuilding in the post-war era. Yet even in cities like Coventry that were extensively damaged you still have a plurality of architecture from different ages.

In the City of London, partly thanks to planning permission 17th century architecture exists alongside modern tower blocks.

Contrast the blank sheet approach of Things To Come with the immersive story nature of anime Ghost In The Shell; which based its architecture on Hong Kong.

You can see a mix of modern skyscrapers, tong tau-style tenements and post-war composite buildings that make the most of Hong Kong’s space. Given Hong Kong’s historically strong real estate marketplace, there are very strong incentives to build up new denser land uses, yet layers of architecture from different ages still exist.

COBOL and other ‘dead’ languages.

If you look at computer history, you realise that it is built on layers. Back in the 1960s computing was a large organisation endeavour. A good deal of these systems ran on COBOL, a computer language created in 1958. New systems were being written in COBOL though the mid-2000s for banks and stock brokerages. These programmes are still maintained, many of them still going long after the people who wrote them had retired from the workforce.

These systems were run on mainframe computers, though some of these have been replaced by clusters of servers. IBM still serves its Z-series of mainframe computers. Mainframe computing has even been moved to cloud computing services.

In 1966, MUMPS was created out of a National Institute of Health project at Massachusetts General Hospital. The programming language was built out of frustration to support high performing databases. MUMPS has gone on to support health systems around the world and projects within the European Space Agency.

If you believe the technology industry all of these systems have been dead and buried by:
- Various computer languages
- Operating systems like UNIX, Linux and Windows
- Minicomputers
- Workstations
- PCs and Macs
- Smartphones and tablets
- The web
At a more prosaic level infrastructure like UK railway companies, German businesses and Japanese government departments have been using fax machines over two decades since email became ubiquitous in businesses and most households in the developed world.

The adoption curve.

The adoption curve is a model that shows how products are adopted. The model was originally proposed by academic Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations, published in 1962. The blue line is percentage of new users over time and the yellow line is an idealised market penetration. However, virtually no innovations get total adoption. My parents don’t have smartphones, friends don’t have televisions. There are some people that still live off the grid in developed countries without electricity or indoor plumbing.

When you look at businesses and homes, different technologies often exist side-by-side. In UK households turntables for vinyl records exist alongside streaming systems. Stuffed bookshelves exist alongside laptops, tablets and e-readers.

Yahoo! Internet Life magazine

Yahoo! Internet Life magazine is a microcosm of this layers of the future co-existence . Yahoo! is now a shadow of its former self, but its still valued for its financial news and email. The company was founded in 1994, just over 30 years ago. It was in the vanguard of consumer Internet services alongside the likes of Wired, Excite, Go, MSN, Lycos and Netscape’s Net Center.

Yahoo! Internet Life magazine was published in conjunction with Ziff Davis from 1996 to 2002. At the time when it was being published the web was as much a cultural force as it was a technology that people adopted. It was bigger than gaming or generative AI are now in terms of cultural impact. Yet there was no incongruity in being a print magazine about online media. Both existed side-by-side.

Post-print, Yahoo! Life is now an online magazine that is part of the Yahoo! web portal.

Technology is the journey, not the destination.

Technology and innovation often doesn’t meet the ideals set of it, for instance USB-C isn’t quite the universal data and power transfer panacea that consumers are led to believe. Cables and connectors that look the same have different capabilities. There is no peak reached, but layers of the future laid on each other and often operating in parallel. It’s a similar situation in home cinema systems using HDMI cables or different versions of Bluetooth connected devices.
November 13, 2024
Pagers + more things
Pagers

Pagers went back into the news recently with Hizbollah’s exploding pagers. YouTuber Perun has done a really good run down of what happened.

Based on Google Analytics information about my readership the idea of pagers might need an explanation. You’ve probably used a pager already, but not realised it yet.

A restaurant pager from Korean coffee shop / dessert café A Twosome Place.

For instance if you’ve been at a restaurant and given puck that brings when your table is ready, that’s a pager. The reason why its big it to prevent customers stealing them rather than the technology being bulky.

On a telecoms level, it’s a similar principle but on a bigger scale. A transmitter sends out a signal to a particular device. In early commercial pagers launched in the 1960s such as the ‘Bellboy’ service, the device made a noise and you then got to a telephone, phoned up a service centre to receive a message left for you. Over time, the devices shrunk from something the size of a television remote control to even smaller than a box of matches. The limit to how small the devices got depended on display size and battery size. You also got displays that showed a phone number to call back.

By the time I had a pager, they started to get a little bigger again because they had displays that could send both words and numbers. These tended to be shorter than an SMS message and operators used shortcuts for many words in a similar way to instant messaging and text messaging. The key difference was that most messages weren’t frivolous emotional ‘touchbases’ and didnt use emojis.

A Motorola that was of a similar vintage to the one I owned.

When I was in college, cellphones were expensive, but just starting to get cheaper. The electronic pager was a good half-way house. When I was doing course work, I could be reached via my pager number. Recruiters found it easier to get hold of me, which meant I got better jobs during holiday time as a student.

I moved to cellphone after college when I got a deal at Carphone Warehouse. One Motorola Graphite GSM phone which allowed two lines of SMS text to be displayed. I had an plan that included the handset that cost £130 and got 12 months usage. For which I got a monthly allowance of 15 minutes local talk time a month.

I remember getting a call about winning my first agency job, driving down a country road with the phone tucked under my chin as I pulled over to take the call. By this time mobile phones were revolutionising small businesses with tradesmen being able to take their office with them.

The internet and greater data speeds further enhanced that effect.

Pagers still found their place as communications back-up channel in hospitals and some industrial sites. Satellite communications allowed pagers to be reached in places mobile networks haven’t gone, without the high cost of satellite phones.

That being said, the NHS are in the process of getting rid of their pagers after COVID and prior to COVID many treatment teams had already moved to WhatsApp groups on smartphones. Japan had already closed down their last telecoms pager network by the mid-2010s. Satellite two-way pagers are still a niche application for hikers and other outward bound activities.

Perun goes into the reasons why pagers were attractive to Hesbollah:
- They receive and don’t transmit back. (Although there were 2-way pager networks that begat the likes of the BlackBerry device based on the likes of Ericsson’s Mobitex service.)
- The pager doesn’t know your location. It doesn’t have access to GNSS systems like GPS, Beidou, Gallileo or GLONASS. It doesn’t have access to cellular network triangulation. Messages can’t transmit long messages, but you have to assume that messages are sent ‘in the clear’ that is can be read widely.
Consumer behaviour

Yes, CEOs are moving left, but ‘woke capitalism’ is not the whole story | FT

Culture

‘We were cheeky outlaws getting away with it’: the total euphoria of Liverpool’s 90s club scene | The Guardian – maybe one day I will tell my side of this tale. It’s all a bit more nuanced and I was stone cold sober throughout it all, which is a rare perspective.

Economics

Invest 2035: the UK’s modern industrial strategy – GOV.UK

Corporate Germany is on sale | FT

Health

Ukraine’s pioneering virtual reality PTSD therapy | The Counteroffensive

Korea

The sabukaru Guide to Seoul’s PC Room Culture | Sabukaru

Luxury

How luxury priced itself out of the market | FT – brands have tested the elasticity of pricing and pushed beyond the limits for their middle class customer base

Watch-maker Jaeger-LeCoultre expands into fragrances inspired by its Reverso dress watches: Jaeger-LeCoultre fragrances take form | Luxury Daily

Ozempic is transforming your gym | FT, The Vogue Business Spring/Summer 2025 size inclusivity report | Vogue Business – GLP-1s blamed for stalled progress.

Ferrari, Hermès lead global luxury brand growth in 2024: Interbrand | Luxury Daily

What is Chinese style today? | Vogue Business – street style at Shanghai Fashion Week has been low-key. The bold looks of the past have given way to a softer aesthetic that’s more layered and feminine, with nods to Chinese culture and history. This pared-back vibe was also found on the runways. Part of this might be down to a policy led movement against conspicuous consumption typified by Xi Jinping’s ‘common prosperity‘.

Marketing

Adland’s talent spill: Seniors double blocked as ageism, cost-cutting compounded by ‘threatened’ younger managers | Mi3

Where to start with multisensory marketing | WARC – 61% of consumers looking for brands that can “ignite intense emotions”. Immersive experiences that are holistic tap into people’s emotions and linger in the memory. It’s also an opportunity for using powerful storytelling to communicate a brand story.

Media

Tesco to launch location-based self-scanner adverts in stores – Retail Gazette

Everyone is burning out on the news, including journalists – Baekdal

Online

Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids – Hindenburg Research

How Google Influences Public Opinion | HackerNoon

Software

Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX • The Register

Web-of-no-web

Airbus to cut 2500 staff in Space Systems | EE News Europe – “In recent years, the defence and space sector and, thus, our Division have been impacted by a fast changing and very challenging business context with disrupted supply chains, rapid changes in warfare and increasing cost pressure due to budgetary constraints,” said Mike Schoellhorn, CEO of the Airbus Defence and Space business.

Wireless

Boeing plans quantum satellite | EE News Europe

Elon Musk battles Indian billionaires over satellite internet spectrum | FT
October 24, 2024
Cocaine Cowboys + more things

Cocaine Cowboys

Cocaine Cowboys by Nicola Tallant tells the story of the Kinahan organisation. The Kinahan organisation is a group that wholesales and retails illegal drugs in association with other organised crime groups. Tellant explains how deprivation, geography and economic growth fuelled drug trafficking and abuse in Ireland. Isolated council estates and economic hardship drove a heroin epidemic. The subsequent Asian Tiger economy only uplifted young professionals who then were a ripe market for cocaine. Cocaine added to Ireland’s already difficult relationship with alcohol use and abuse.

Crime journalism such as this is popular in Ireland because it is so concentrated through blood and marriage ties. We don’t have the kind of diversity that the British criminal underworld has. This means that it’s much more ‘relevant’ to Irish society.

But the book title itself is very interesting. There is a clear parallel to the scale of the cross-border drug trade between the US and Mexico.

Irish country music star Daniel O’Donnell courtesy of TG4

But there is also an underlying western theme across Irish culture. The vast majority of us are at most a few generations from the farm. We have had hard times which is why country music appealed and even morphed into a localised genre Country and Irish popular in rural areas and amongst lorry drivers (or in American truck drivers that drive ‘semis’.)

Tallant’s stance is definitely anti-Kinahan; but the book title Cocaine Cowboys gives them the hero status and taps deeply into the mainline that the cowboy and related elements like country music have into Irish culture at home and abroad. Cocaine Cowboys might be the inspiration for the next generation to replace the Kinahans.

If you want to know more beyond the book Nicola Tallant and her colleagues at Irish tabloid the Sunday World host a podcast called Crime World.

Branding

Mozilla’s brand update gives its old T-Rex logo a fresh new look – The Verge

China

China threatens Calvin Klein owner with blacklist over Xinjiang cotton | FT

China’s first industrial leases are expiring. Will their holders renew? | South China Morning Post – it will be interesting to see what the Hong Kong tongs do

Consumer behaviour

Death of the corkscrew? Only 27% of young people in UK own one, report says | The Guardian – Prevalence of screw-top bottles and abstinence among young people blamed for falling popularity of gadget

Understanding Desire in the Age of Ozempic – The Atlantic – fascinating study in how GLP-1 treatments are not only reducing the desire for food, but also other products like alcohol and tobacco.

After peak woke, what next? The Economist – in the past decade, a form of wokeness has arisen on the illiberal left which is characterised by extreme pessimism about America and its capacity to make progress, especially on race. According to this view, all the country’s problems are systemic or structural, and the solutions to them are illiberal, including censorship and positive discrimination by race. This wokeness defines people as members of groups in a rigid hierarchy of victims and oppressors. Like the Puritans of old, adherents focus less on workable ideas for reducing discrimination than on publicly rooting out sinful attitudes in themselves and others (especially others). The Economist has analysed how influential these ideas are today by looking at public opinion, the media, publishing, higher education and the corporate world. Using a host of measures, we found that woke peaked in 2021-22 and has since receded. For example, polling by Gallup found that the share of people who worry a great deal about race relations climbed from 17% in 2014 to 48% in 2021, but has since fallen to 35%. Likewise, the term “white privilege” was used 2.5 times for every 1m words written by the New York Times in 2020. Last year it was used 0.4 times per 1m words. – Of course, woke’s failure could be viewed by proponents as a sign of deep-rooted systemic prejudice

Economics

Why Britain has stagnated? | Foundations – this reads true and hits hard. My parents came to the United Kingdom when the motorway network was being built, power stations were being constructed and the first generation of nuclear submarines were being constructed. In London the Victoria line was constructed. Now the UK struggles to build any infrastructure and its strategic industrial capabilities have been hollowed out or disappeared.

FMCG

Unilever moves on ‘sub-par’ marketing | WARC – That means consistent execution in marketing innovation, marketing quality, proposition sharpness, execution of pricing, execution of distribution. Fernandez suggested that, on a scale of 1-10, the business is currently at around six but needs to get to eight or nine (“ten doesn’t exist”). A&P spending is increasing as a proportion of revenue, from 13% in 2022, to 14.3% in 2023, and 15.1% in H1 2024. “There is an implicit recognition that our level of investment was not in line with our ambition of volume growth,” he said. That increased investment is not there to fund a growing volume of marketing content, he added. “I’m much more concerned about the quality of the stuff that we put in the market than the amount”. And that also means a focus on brand-building. “We see other people putting much more focus on promotional pricing,” he said, “but we always will prefer to invest in long-term, equity-building activities.” – CFO burns marketing teams ‘I believe our marketing was subpar”

Hong Kong

Dinner with strangers? Hongkongers craving real-world connections turn to ‘secret’ meet-ups | South China Morning Post – In a tapas restaurant in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, about 80 people are chatting away on the packed second floor, clinking glasses and sharing small plates while discussing issues ranging from mental health to childhood dreams.

Innovation

How a Chinese billionaire’s Silicon Valley splurge caught the eye of the FBI | FT

Kyoto company developing autofocus glasses for sufferers of presbyopia and other conditions | SoraNews24 -Japan News-

Luxury

Burberry shares tumble to 15-year low amid questions over its luxury brand status – Retail Gazette contrast with top-tier luxury brand trajectory: Hermès chief eyes haute couture push as Paris house rides out luxury gloom – but has to wonder about Hermès leaning even further into Chinese market.

Marketing

Is marketing entering its ‘era of less’? | WARC – based on Gartner CMO surveys marketers are increasingly being seen as cost centres and are being asked to do more with less which is affecting mar tech spend, staffing and agency spend.

Colgate-Palmolive: ‘The advertising is working’ | WARC

EZ Newswire Signs Exclusive Distribution Deal with Reuters | Reuters – sounds like a PR placement automation?

What’s fueling America’s Zyn obsession? | On Point

Innovative research that literally put people in the driver’s seat | WARC – More than half of strategists (59%) are integrating AI into their strategy development process in a cautiously progressive way. They need to identify the skills that AI can’t replace, such as getting buy-in for a strategy, and double down on them. Speedy access to research and insight (74%) and streamlining repetitive tasks (74%) are the top opportunities strategists see in leveraging AI in the strategy process.

Future of Strategy 2024: Synthetic data – speedy saviour or another example of the industry’s arrogance? | WARC – it’ll be useful when time is of the essence, and you want to ‘speak’ to people and get their thoughts on your hypotheses, ideas or campaigns. In that scenario, I can see how that approach may replace an ad-hoc focus group set up hastily in the agency’s boardroom. But we’re not here purely to understand people. If the role of communications is to move people emotionally, shouldn’t we also be here to feel people? As Richard Huntington, CSO of Saatchi & Saatchi says: “You can’t feel data.” The beauty of humans (and the beauty of ethnography) is that so often it’s not what we say that powers an ‘insight’ or a strategy, a campaign or some NPD… it’s what people don’t say. It’s the nods and winks, the gestures, the objects with meaning they have in their homes and in their lives. That texture isn’t picked up by a typical conversation – be that with synthetic data or in a focus group. These feelings that are elicited from ethnography are the special sauce that can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Break Through: How new and returning brands can grow with TV – System1 Group

The Rise of The Populist Brand – Eavesdrop

Online

The TikTok, Shein, and Temu Conundrum – by Ivy Yang – TikTok’s defence: Shein and Temu have worse privacy profiles than we do

Launch of Social Web Foundation | Social Web Foundation – set up by the great and the good of web 2.0, notably Tom Coates who brings a wealth of product expertise.

AI Training is Copyright Infringement | Initiative Urheberrecht and The Intelligence Age | Sam Altman

Security

The Netherlands will not back EU-wide screening of app messages – DutchNews.nl

The Pig Butchering Invasion Has Begun | WIRED

Technology

Qualcomm has approached Intel over buy-out | EE News Europe – antitrust related issues around the world

OpenAI Is A Bad Business | Ed Zitron – the economics of generative AI are still bad, despite improvements in hardware design.

How AlphaChip transformed computer chip design – Google DeepMind

Tools

How I Replaced Notion with Reminders, Numbers, and Notes | by Joan Westenberg – this is a prime example of what I have been hearing from other people. I have been using Notes app in particular from the get-go.

Home | LibreOffice – Free and private office suite – Based on OpenOffice – Compatible with Microsoft – I have 35 years of content saved, and LibreOffice can open them all. When you’ve been writing for years, your manuscript formats will often be obsolete (though I’ve tried to make decisions that make my poems available platform agnostic, such as using plaintext, but line breaks and stanza breaks don’t always translate well in markdown). LibreOffice is an incredible tool for opening 25 year old wordperfect files when I need them.

Web-of-no-web

Meta’s Orion smart glasses look like the future of AR – The Verge

Apple Knew Where the Puck Was Going, But Meta Skated There – the PAN or personal area network has been talked about for 20+ years. What this misses is that the Orion glasses were possible thanks to silicon carbide lens which are a non-trivial thing to manufacture at scale

October 15, 2024
September 2024 newsletter
September 2024 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my September 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 14th issue. When I lived in Hong Kong and dealt with Chinese accounts, the number 4 was considered unlucky, rather like 13. 14 is even worse due to it sounding so similar to ‘is dead’ or ‘will be dead’ or ‘will be certain to die’ depending on the variant of the spoken language used. In other cultures the symbolism of 14 is more nebulous at best.

September got off to an odd start, we seem to have had all the seasons, rather than settling gently into the run up to autumn. I managed to avoid traditional mooncake during mid-autumn festival celebrations that I attended. My waistline was thankful for the #ROMO (relief of missing out).

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.
- Being on the ground in Merseyside as the Southport stabbings unfolded gave me a different perspective on things.
- How generative AI features are affecting the Google search experience and much more.
- Not the target demographic – or how marketers and agencies are leaving money on the table.
- The mooncake crisis in China.
Books that I have read.

My reading for September 2024 slacked off a bit as real world obligations kicked in.
- The Old Woman With the Knife worked on a number of levels for me. Firstly, I loved its portrayal of modern Korean society, from the aging population to the Confucian view of seniority that makes everyday interactions more complex than other Asian societies. Without revealing too much, the old woman in question is someone in the twilight of her career and how she is coping with new up-and-coming rivals at work.
- Panic! edited by Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis became famous when he wrote an account of his career in investment banking in Liar’s Poker. His career overlapped with the 1987 financial crash. Since then he has been a writer who has documented key turns in the economy. Because of this background Lewis was the ideal person to curate a history of financial crisis from contemporary accounts at the time. Panic! covers the 1987 financial crash, the 1998 debt crisis, the dot com bubble, and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/8. I read the book in short bursts mainly due to asks on my time, rather than the nature of the book. Panic! seemed pertinent to read now. The publication of Pegasus Research’s iconic quantitative research on ‘burn rates’ in March 2000 on dot.com company burn rates makes it highly relevant to revisit when we are in hype cycles such as those surrounding health tech, fintech, crypto and more – if for no other reason than pointing out the folly of trying to pick winners in hype-driven public markets with a high degree of opacity.
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro moved from my to be read pile to must read pile given everything that has been going on with generative AI over the the past couple of years that it has sat on my bookshelf. Ishiguro uses speculative fiction to explore the different kinds of love and attachment, alongside loss. From a machine learning perspective it poses interesting questions about applying observational learning rather than rules based learning in systems that are supposed to exist in the real world. Klara is an ‘artificial friend’ for a child who is going through ‘levelling up’. Levelling up could be seen as a euphemism for everything from the cramming schools popular in Asian education systems to the challenges humans face in an information heavy environment. Ultimately there is something more human and child-like in Klara’s experiences than the human co-protagonists.
Things I have been inspired by.

AI proficiency.

Section, the education company founded by Professor Scott Galloway has AI proficiency as a key element in its offering. They have put together research to show how low the current level of proficiency is. They consider this research a rallying cry; but the results could also be reflective of a technology adoption curve that isn’t moving at the speed of hype, which is what came through in my examination of public discussions during the summer.

Secondly, research from the Upwork Research Institute implies a higher a higher adoption rate of generative AI, but lower success rate with the outputs generating inefficiencies rather than productivity gains. Part of the problem seems to come from organisational leadership and the way generative AI is being implemented.

WARC have published a report which looks at What’s working in generative AI from a marketing perspective. Some of the ideas like synthetic data in market research are not quite in prime time yet and generative AI’s large carbon footprint can’t be ignored.

Digitalisation and brands

Harvard Business Review published research that indicated a weaker relationship between profit share and brand in certain types of businesses. On the face of it, this supports Scott Galloway’s ‘end of brand‘ hypothesis. WARC covered the research paper in depth pointing out that for each percentage gain in market share highly digitised businesses gain 0.19% increase in profit compared to 0.26% in less digital businesses. This seems to be due to a multitude of factors:
- Efficiency gains due to digitalisation have an effect on the existing profit prior to the market share. Efficiency is the main selling point of much digital automation from CRM systems to performance advertising.
- Market power of larger companies ( a la Google).
- Perceptions of quality – digital-only companies might look more reputable due to the lack of real-world signals to the contrary
Market share (and brand) still matters, but it hits different depending on the business. B2B and growth hacking business approaches gain less than consumer orientated businesses. A larger dataset of Kantar-sourced data analysed by Oxford University researchers found that better brand effects were down to ‘difference’ as in how customers see – and experience the brand – as being different enough from competitors.

FEAST

FEAST is an occasional magazine and curated set of events all about food and its ingredients. If you are a strategist working with a food or beverage client it’s well worth exploring their archive as a source of inspiration for insights given its in-depth and thoughtful arts-based approach.

Streaming plateau

I finally got to dive into Ofcom’s Media Nations research report. I recommend that if you are involved in the advertising-media industrial complex in any way shape or form, spend some time reading it. On the plus side, survey respondents consider accurate balanced news as a key part of the public service mandate of radio and television. Secondly during 2023, broadcast brought many of us together still for key events including the first episodes of tentpole series.

Ofcom

More dispiritingly, I realised that amongst the tentpole TV series was season 23 or I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. TV advertising revenues declined faster than online video revenues grew and subscription based video on demand take-up plateaued. It’s pure speculation on my part, but this might have been reached because COVID accelerated adoption.

Finally, as a film fan who buys Blu-Rays of films that don’t appear on streaming services consistently, the amount of time watching DVDs and and Blu-Rays have a very small usage across all age groups. I don’t think that’s good news for arthouse and cult cinema.

Things I have watched.

The Crow – less of a remake of the iconic Brandon Lee film and more of a reinvention of the franchise. It’s a good if unengaging film, many of the young adult audience I went to see it with won’t have the original or the comic books as a reference point. It has been described on other parts of the net as ‘the worst movie of the year‘. This is probably a bit unfair; there is a lot of ‘straight to Netflix’ dross out there. FKA Twigs character in the film grew on me as I watched it.

The last time I saw The Terminator in a cinema was in a double bill with the then newly launched Terminator 2 at the then new Odeon multiplex in Bromborough. I got to see it again thanks to a 4K restoration. Despite having seen The Terminator several times on tape, DVD and Blu-Ray – this time it hit different. It hit harder and it was all down the way the screen filled my vision and the punch of the sound track. Despite in-home cinema set-ups, you just can’t get at home unless you live in a large industrial unit sized home. The analogue special effects held up surprisingly well and the plot was just as taunt as I remembered it. There was less people in the cinema than for the screening than for The Crow.

As I write this, I have just watched episode one of the latest series of Slow Horses. It has gotten off to the high standard set by the previous series and book. Time to put on my Roddy Ho t-shirt again.

Useful tools.

Table Capture

If you’ve ever tried to cut and paste a table and data from a website into an spreadsheet and then spent the rest of the afternoon parsing it in cell-by-cell you will appreciate the benefit of this browser extension.

Humaniser for GPT created content

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve used services like Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini as a starting point for copy, or to summarise documents. UndetectableGPT looks at providing alternatives to ‘tell-tale’ phraseology in generative AI copy.

Data analysis

Groupt will take a CSV file and categorise the data including visualisation, so you only have to focus on wrapping a narrative around it to fit into the wider storytelling of your presentation.

The sales pitch.

I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my September 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into October and crispness of a bright autumn morning!

Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
September 26, 2024
Mooncakes + more things
Mooncakes

Mooncakes were a big part of my time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. This year, mid-September marked mid-autumn festival across Asia or known as Chuseok in Korea. It is similar to harvest festivals that happen elsewhere in the world.

It is celebrated in Chinese communities with mooncakes. Mooncakes traditionally have been made of fat filled pastry cases and lids filled with red bean or lotus seed paste and a salted dried egg yolk.

Mooncakes are moulded and have auspicious messages or symbols embossed on the top, like the double happiness ideogram which also appears on new year decorations and at weddings.

In the past mooncakes have been used to make political statements in Hong Kong where they were embossed with messages against the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019. This mirrored mooncake history, where concealed messages were alleged to have been used to ferment rebellion against Mongolian rule in China centuries ago.

China saw a halving of mooncakes sold this year, compared to last year. This is a mix of fast-moving events like the state of consumer spending and longer term factors including gifting culture and attitudes to health and fitness.

The economy

The consumer economy seems to be doing worse than industrial output. Youth unemployment is still an issue.

Gifting culture

China saw a crackdown on premium priced mooncakes as part of a government move against ‘excessive consumption‘ driven by societal excess and ‘money worship’. This overall movement has dampened luxury sales. The Chinese government stopped officials buying mooncakes a decade ago as part of a crackdown on corruption.

Some consumers just aren’t into them

They were as divisive as Christmas cake is in Irish and British households. Brands like Haagen-Daz and Starbucks have looked to reinvent mooncakes into something more palatable.

Health and fitness

Health and fitness has been steadily growing as a trend in China. A number of reasons have been at play including changing beauty standards. Chinese women are still going to favour slimness over muscle, but home workouts and running have been increasing in popularity. The fitness industry has been growing and the Chinese government has also tried to foster interest in winter sports. So there would be a good reason to avoid ruining all the hard work that you put in by eating mooncakes.

Business

Nike CEO John Donahoe to Step Down | BoF

Economics

Why Do Workers Dislike Inflation? Wage Erosion and Conflict Costs* by Joao Guerreiro, Jonathon Hazell, Chen Lian and Christina Patterson – workers must take costly actions (“conflict”) to have nominal wages catch up with inflation, meaning there are welfare costs even if real wages do not fall as inflation rises. We study a menu-cost style model, where workers choose whether to engage in conflict with employers to secure a wage increase. We show that, following a rise in inflation, wage catchup resulting from more frequent conflict does not raise welfare. Instead, the impact of inflation on worker welfare is determined by what we term “wage erosion”—how inflation would lower real wages if workers’ conflict decisions did not respond to inflation. As a result, measuring welfare using observed wage growth understates the costs of inflation. We conduct a survey showing that workers are willing to sacrifice 1.75% of their wages to avoid conflict. Calibrating the model to the survey data, the aggregate costs of inflation incorporating conflict more than double the costs of inflation via falling real wages alone

FMCG

Unilever ends up as a punching bag for Greenpeace and having their purpose blown up. As a campaign idea, the public celebration by the Dove brand team of the 20th anniversary of Dove’s real beauty positioning and creative left themselves open to this. Greenpeace used a skilful reframing in this creative.

The reason why the developing world seems to be disproportionately affected by plastic waste highlighted is for a number of reasons:
- A lot of and paper and plastic recycling is shipped abroad. It used to go to China, but they declined to accept waste to recycle from 2018 onwards. So this waste went to other markets.
- Developing markets have single portion packaging so that FMCG companies can distribute via neighbourhood shops and sell the product for the price a consumer can afford.
- Plastic is easier to colour, manufacture, package and transport than glass, metal or coated paper. Biodegradable or effective post-use supply chains are well behind where they should be. And even if you were open to recycling, there may be brand issues.
Innovation

Chinese scientists claim they can use Starlink satellites to detect stealth aircraft | BGR

Japan

AI will help Sony expand Japanese anime’s growing fan base | FT – but would also help competitors out-produce Sony. Expect a Chinese anime avalanche.

Marketing

Campbell’s drops the ‘soup’: what the evidence says about adapting brand fundamentals | WARC

Media

OpenAI Messed With the Wrong Mega-Popular Parenting Forum | WIRED

Retail media frenzy muddies negotiations with brands, who agency execs say must spend or ‘suffer the consequences’ – Digiday and Retail media networks put the squeeze on brands | WARC – Spending on RMNs could be seen as part of normal partnership agreements between brands and retailers that have traditionally included marketing commitments. That shades into a grey area if retailers become focused primarily on growing their ad business, but those same retailers can’t expect brands to spend more unless they can demonstrate results. At the same time, brands have their wider media mix to consider.

In context
- The pairing of advertisers with consumers close to the point of purchase via rich, first-party data is leading to better ROI relative to other channels for some advertisers and is cited as a key driver of increasing retail media investment.
- Retail media is growing in double digits every year; it currently accounts for around 14% of global ad spend and is projected to account for 22.7% of online advertising by 2026.
- Retail media is no longer a ‘medium’ in the conventional sense but is instead evolving into an infrastructure underpinning the entire digital advertising ecosystem.
Content Creators in the Adult Industry Want a Say in AI Rules | WIRED

Security

JLR’s letter: what Land Rover’s doing to stop your older car getting nicked | CAR Magazine – update on JLR’s security crisis

Software

A brief history of QuickTime – The Eclectic Light Company

Technology

NTT Data builds a mainframe cloud for Banks • The Register – mainframes are still amazing for large scale batch processing
September 25, 2024