According to the AMA – Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. This has contained a wide range of content as a section over the years including
Super Bowl advertising
Spanx
Content marketing
Fake product reviews on Amazon
Fear of finding out
Genesis the Korean luxury car brand
Guo chao – Chinese national pride
Harmony Korine’s creative work for 7-Eleven
Advertising legend Bill Bernbach
Japanese consumer insights
Chinese New Year adverts from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore
Doughnutism
Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
Influencer promotions
A media diary
Luxe streetwear
Consumerology by marketing behaviour expert Phil Graves
Payola
Dettol’s back to work advertising campaign
Eat Your Greens edited by Wiemer Snijders
Dove #washtocare advertising campaign
The fallacy of generations such as gen-z
Cultural marketing with Stüssy
How Brands Grow Part 2 by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp
Facebook’s misleading ad metrics
The role of salience in advertising
SAS – What is truly Scandinavian? advertising campaign
Brand winter
Treasure hunt as defined by NPD is the process of consumers bargain hunting
Lovemarks
How Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer’s needs and tastes
Liberation Day was a glorified press conference where the Trump administration revealed their tariff scale on every country around the world. Weirdly enough, Russia wasn’t tariffed. Here’s some of the interesting analysis I saw prior to, and after the event.
The Trump administration leant into an aesthetic influenced by patriotic memes, the steeliness of The Apprentice and generative AI – a look I call Midjourney Modern. Liberation Day was no exception.
The Economist did a hot take that calls the whole thing a ‘fantasy’.
America’s Cultural Revolution – by Stephen Roach – Conflict – Stephen Roach was an Asian focused chief economist at Morgan Stanley. The American Cultural Revolution narrative is something I have heard from a few contacts in China and Roach echoes that perspective in this article.
Opinion | I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America. – The New York Times – President Trump is focused on what teams American transgender athletes can race on, and China is focused on transforming its factories with A.I. so it can outrace all our factories. Trump’s “Liberation Day” strategy is to double down on tariffs while gutting our national scientific institutions and work force that spur U.S. innovation. China’s liberation strategy is to open more research campuses and double down on A.I.-driven innovation to be permanently liberated from Trump’s tariffs.
Beijing’s message to America: We’re not afraid of you. You aren’t who you think you are — and we aren’t who you think we are. – Thomas Friedman – Overall, I would agree with the sentiment, BUT, you have to remember what he’s been shown is the best view of what China can do and reality is much more complex. I still think that there is a lot of the future being made in places like France, Finland, Latvia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan – as well as China. What China does best is quantity that has a scale all of its own, something America has historically excelled at.
DIY Birkin? China’s Gen Z 3D print dupes, share on RedNote | Jing Daily – Armed with affordable 3D printers and free design templates, young consumers are crafting their own versions of iconic luxury accessories. – Homage flowerpots or penholders rather than ‘dupes’ but 3D printing feels mainstream
Online
Revealed: Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests | Censorship | The Guardian – After requests from the governments of Russia and China, Google has removed content such as YouTube videos of anti-state protesters or content that criticises and alleges corruption among their politicians. Google’s own data reveals that, globally, there are 5.6m items of content it has “named for removal” after government requests. Worldwide requests to Google for content removals have more than doubled since 2020, according to cybersecurity company Surfshark.
WeRide to open driverless taxi service in Zurich | EE News – Chinese operator is set to launch a fully unmanned taxi service in Zurich in the next few months. This follows the launch of its latest generation Robotaxi, the GXR, for fully unmanned paid autonomous ride-hailing services in Beijing. The GXR, with a L4-level redundant drive-by-wire chassis architecture, is WeRide’s second Robotaxi model to achieve fully driverless commercial operations in the city following pilot trials.
Apple announced that features showcased during the 2024 WWDC enhancing Siri would be delayed. Apple Intelligence delayed represents a serious breach of trust for Apple’s early adopters and the developer community. On its own whilst that’s rare from Apple, it’s survivable.
Apple has made other FUBARs: the Newton, some of the Performa model Macintosh computers in the 1990s, the Apple Pippin, Apple QuickTake cameras and the Apple Cube computer from 2000.
The most recent game-changing product has been the AirPod series of headphones which have become ubiquitous on the tube and client video calls. But there has been a definite vibe shift around perceptions at Apple.
Recent product upgrades to the MacBook Air were given a muted welcome. Personally I think Apple came out with a banger of a product: the M4 processor in the MacBook Air M1 form-factor at the Intel MacBook Air price of $999.
The Vision Pro goggles are at best a spoiler on the high-end market for Meta’s VR efforts, and an interesting experiment once lens technology catches up with their concept. At worst they are a vanity project for Tim Cook that have a very limited audience.
Conceptually Apple Intelligence told a deceptively good story. Let others develop the underlying LLMs that would power Apple Intelligence. This solution is partially forced on Apple due to the mutually exclusive needs between China and its other markets. But it also meant that Apple had a smaller AI challenge than other vendors. On-device intelligence that would work out the best way to solve a problem and handle easier problems without the latency of consulting a cloud service. More complex problems would then be doled out to off-device services with privacy being a key consideration. The reality is that Apple Intelligence delayed until 2027 because of technical challenges.
One of my most loved films is Chungking Express directed by Wong Ka wai. It was one of the reasons that I decided to take up the opportunity to live and work in Hong Kong. This YouTube documentary cuts together some of the oral history about the making of the film. The story of the production is nuts.
Drone deliveries
Interesting documentary by Marques Brownlee on the limited use cases and massive leaps in innovation going into drone delivery systems.
Effective Marketing for Financial Services
Les Binet presents a financial services-specific view on marketing effectiveness. It has some interesting nuances, in particular how brand building is MORE important in subscription services.
Tony Touch set
Tony Touch did a set for Aimé Leon Dore. It’s an impeccably programmed set.
LUCID Air focus on efficiency
It’s rare to hear the spokesperson for an American car company quoting Colin Chapman’s design philosophy – which he shared with Norman Foster.
I am fortunate to be an awards juror for the second time. This is for the Adforum PHNX advertising awards which attracts entries from around the world.
As part of the process I responded to some interview questions. I hope that my old gaffer Tony Gresty appreciated my quoting of him decades later and was surprised that there wasn’t pushback about my assertion of a ‘post-social’ marketing era.
What motivates you to be part of the PHNX Jury, and what do you hope to bring to the judging process?
Before I worked in advertising, I served an apprenticeship in plant process engineering. My old gaffer who was responsible for me had a few sayings. One of which was practice sharpens skill. By being a judge, I hope that I am helping people within the industry around the world to sharpen their skill. Seeing great challenging work and asking myself how it fits the customer and client needs in turn, helps further sharpen my skill as a strategist. TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) altruist generosity?
PHNX has always been about celebrating creativity in all its forms. What new perspectives or disciplines do you think deserve more recognition in award shows today?
Strategy has the Effies, BUT its focus is larger than creativity with a major focus on efficiency and effectiveness rather the creative process. Strategy always provides the ‘assist’ with single-minded insight and creative JOTBD (job to be done), but is never the ‘goal scorer’ to use an American sports stats metaphor. I think that creativity is not only about the creative, but also the context where the creative is placed – which brings in the disciplines of project management’s orchestration, production’s craft and media planning. I think this is going to become far more important as we go towards a post-social era.
Which countries or regions do you think are leading the creative field right now? And which emerging markets should we look out for?
A really interesting question. Leading is probably the wrong phrase to use, but there are markets that are under-estimated. Thailand and the Philippines have well-deserved reputations for emotional storytelling. Year-after-year when I look at lunar new year adverts Malaysia hits well above its weight given the size of the market.
Japan has been consistently delighting advertising folk for the past five decades.
Probably a better question to ask me after I have been through this year’s award entries.
What trends or cultural shifts do you think will define the most impactful creative work this year?
With everything that’s going on, I think we’ll need more humour. Trends within the advertising industry are also leaning towards a better mix of formats. As an industry we over-index on social vs. attention, efficiency and effectiveness for large brands. So we’ve seen a renaissance in OOH amongst other formats.
There is also a return to basics: creative consistency, fluent objects, the power of storytelling and humour. Finally consumers are more interested in consuming more longer form audio and video content, so what a creative execution might look like I hope is very different.
If you could give one piece of advice to agencies and creatives submitting their work, what would it be?
Be single-minded in terms of category consideration. My biggest criticism of last year’s PHNX award entries was not about the quality of the work per se. Many of the entries had a given creative was put in for consideration for the wrong category. And it was the same entries doing it over-and-over again. If it isn’t relevant it’s just going to get ignored or get under the skin of the judges. In the same way that a poorly-placed ad that is slapped all over the place without consideration would have a similar effect in the real world.
Rant over: I wish everyone the best of luck, finally don’t be disheartened. All of the work was of a high standard, choosing winners is hard.
Which creative minds are inspiring you the most right now?
In the widest creative sense I am working my way through veteran Hong Kong film director Johnnie To‘s back catalogue; some of his works like Breaking News feel like exceptionally contemporary given our media environment. A couple of creatives using AI in a really smart way are Omar Karim aka @arthur_chance on instagram and the Dor Brothers. Agency work-wise VCCP’s immersive installation for Transport for London and a small Malaysian shop called Days Studios (whose bread-and-butter work is usually weddings!), yet, did a fantastic job producing a Chinese New Year ad for a cosmetic treatment clinic Aglow Studio – not what you’d call a big client yet it felt like a bigger production than many large brands. Go Google the ad ‘hiss of prosperity’ and watch it on YouTube.
Welcome to my March 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 20th issue. Or one score, as they used to say down the Mecca bingo hall. A score is a common grouping used in everything from selling produce to indicating the scale of an accident in a news headline. In Japan, it signals legal adulthood and is celebrated with personal ceremonies.
I didn’t know that March was Irish-American Heritage month. I just thought that we had St Patrick’s Day.
Hopefully April will bring us warmer weather that we should expect of spring. In the meantime to keep my spirits up I have been listening to Confidence Man.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
I curated some of the best analyses on DeepSeek, and more interesting things happening online.
Pharmacies are blatantly marketing prescription-only medicines. It’s illegal, there is no GLP-1 permission that allows consumer marketing of prescription-only medicines used for weight loss and weight management.
Clutch Cargo – how a 1960s animation managed to transform production and show the power of storytelling.
A look back at Skype. I will miss its ring tone when it shuts down in May.
Looking at the Majorana 1 chip promising a new generation of quantum computing, generative AI production, refrigeration and an oral history of Wong Kar wai’s In theMood for Love&2046.
Books that I have read.
Now and again you come across a book that stuns you. Red Sky Mourning by Jack Carr, is one such book, but not in a good way. Carr is famous because of his service in the American military which he has since parlayed into a successful entrepreneurial career from TV series to podcasts. So he covers all things tactical knowledgeably. Conceptually the book has some interesting ideas that wouldn’t feel that out of place in a Neal Stephenson or William Gibson novel. So Carr had a reasonably solid plan on making a great story. But as the saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Carr’s enemy was his own writing style without aggressive editing. The editing process is a force multiplier, breathing the artistic brevity of Ernest Hemingway into a manuscript and protecting the author from their own worst impulses. I found the book hard to read because I would repeatedly run up against small niggly aspects, making it hard to suspend disbelief and get into the story. Carr loves his product brands, in this respect Red Sky Mourning reminded me a lot of early Brett Easton-Ellis. Which got me thinking, who is Carr actually writing for? Part of the answer is Hollywood, Carr’s books have been optioned by Amazon, one of which was adapted as The Terminal List. I imagine that another audience would be young (privileged caucasian male) management consultant types who need a bit of down time as they travel to and from client engagements – after a busy few days of on-site interviews, possibly with a tumbler of Macallan 12 – which was purchased in duty-free. The kind of person who considers their Tumi luggage in a tactical manner. The friend who gave it to me, picked it up for light reading and passed it on with a degree of incredulity. On the plus side, at least it isn’t a self-help book. It pains me to end a review so negatively; so one thing that Jack Carr does get right is the absolute superiority of Toyota Land Cruisers in comparison to Land Rover’s products. If you have it in hard copy, and possess sufficient presence of mind, it could serve you well in improvised self-defence as it comes in at a substantial 562 pages including the glossary and acknowledgements.
The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji is a classic murder mystery. A university crime club with each member named after a famous fictional detective gather to investigate a murder on an isolated island. The book slowly unravels the answer to the K-University Mystery Club’s annual trip bringing it to a logical conclusion.
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan was an interesting piece of Chinese historical fiction. It is less fantastic than the wuxia works of Louis Cha that dominated the genre previously. More here.
Chinese Communist Espionage – An Intelligence Primer by Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil tells the story of modern China through the story of its intelligence services. From the chaos under Mao purges and the Cultural Revolution to forces let loose by ‘reform and opening up’. More here.
In the early 2000s, as we moved towards a social web, we saw a number trends that relied on the knowledge of a group of people. Crowdsourcing channeled tasks in a particular way and became a popular ‘innovation engine’ for a while. The wisdom of crowds captured the power of knowledge within nascent question and answer platforms. Prediction markets flourished online. Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner try and explain who and why these models work, particular where they rely on knowledge or good judgement. The book does a good job at referencing their sources and is readable in a similar way to a Malcolm Gladwell book.
Things I have been inspired by.
Why does humour in advertising work?
My Dad is a big fan of the Twix bears advertisement, so much so, that he repeats the script verbatim when it comes on. We know that humour works and that it’s under-used in advertising, but it would be good to have data behind that in order to support it as a suggestion to clients.
Humour as a memory hook: Comedy surprises and delights, it makes consumers stop, engage and then remember. Over time it builds into nostalgia.
It relies on universal insights – that work across age cohorts, cultures and geographies. Its also intrinsically shareable – and not just on social platforms.
Celebrity x humour drives fame: Well-executed humour paired with celebrity endorsements, (Ryan Reynolds being a standout example) boosting brand impact.
Well executed humour can supercharge marketing ROI. Ads with humour are 6.1x more likely to drive market share growth than neutral or dull ads.
Accessible advertising
The Ad Accessibility Alliance have launched The Ad Accessibility Alliance Hub, which made me reflect on accessibility as a subject. I can recommend the hub as it provides good food for thought when considering mandatories for creative. ISBA’s reframing accessible advertising helps make the business case beyond the social benefits of inclusivity. The ISBA also provides links to useful assets. Finally, I can recommend Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge which provides a broader context to help think about accessible advertising as part of a system.
Social platform benchmarks
RealIQ have done great research of engagement rates across thousands of brands in a number of sectors. What we get is an engagement benchmark set across platforms and industries. We can debate the value of engagement, and the different nature of platforms, so you can’t compare across platforms.
Chart of the month.
What I could compare in the RealIQ data was the rate in change in engagement rates year-on-year. The clear losers over time were Facebook and Twitter at an aggregate level. This also explains the x-tortion (as Forrester Research described them) tactics being deployed by Twitter. Combining high rates of engagement decline and reduced reach means that Twitter doesn’t look particularly attractive as a platform vis-a-vis competitors.
Things I have watched.
Hunt (헌트) is a great Korean film. It provides a John Le Carré style spy hunt story in 1980s era South Korea prior to the move towards democracy. It’s a stylish, if brutal film that touches on parts of South Korea’s history which we in the west tend to know very little about. Hunt takes an unflinching look at the legacy of the military government as well as their North Korean rivals.
Philip Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff is a movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s account based on US post-war fighter development through to the height of the Mercury space programme. The film went on to receive eight nominations at the Academy Awards. You have an ensemble cast of great character actors who deal with the highs and lows at the cutting edge of aerospace technology. The Right Stuff is as good as its reputation would have you believe. The film captures the drama and adventure that Wolfe imbued his written account of the journey to space. As a society it is good to be reminded that if we put our mind to it the human race is capable of amazing audacious things.
Disco’s Revenge – an amazing Canadian documentary which has interviews with people from soul and disco stars including Earl Young, David Mancuso, Joe Bataan, Nicky Siano – all of whom were seminal in the founding of disco.
It also featured names more familiar to house music fans including DJ Spinna, Frankie Knuckles, Kevin Saunderson and John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez – who was key in proto vocal house productions.
The documentary also shows hip-hop was influenced by disco mixing.
Along the way it covers the fight for gay rights in the US and its easy to see the continuum onwards to house music and the current dance music scene. It’s one thing knowing it and having read the right books, but the interviews have a power of their own.
It takes things through to ‘club quarantine’ during the COVID-19 lockdown.
I hate that’s its streaming only, rather than Blu-Ray but if you can put that one issue aside and watch it. If you try it and enjoy it, you’ll also love Jed Hallam‘s occasional newsletter Love Will Save The Day.
I picked up a copy of Contagion on DVD, prior to COVID and watched it with friends in a virtual social manner during lockdown. This probably wasn’t the smartest move and I spent the rest of lockdown building my library of Studio Ghibli films instead. It’s a great ensemble film in its own right. Watching it back again now I was struck by how much Contagion got right from Jude Law’s conspiracy theorist with too much influence and combative congressional hearings.
The film makers had the advantage of looking back at SARS which had hit Hong Kong and China in 2002 – 2004. Hong Kong had already been hit by Avian flu H5N1 from 1997 to 2002. Both are a foot note in history now, I had a friend who picked up their apartment on the mid-levels for 30 percent below 1997 market rates due to the buffeting the Hong Kong economy took during this time. The only thing that the film didn’t envision was the surfeit of political leadership in some notable western countries during COVID, which would have added even more drama to Contagion, not even Hollywood script writers could have made that up.
Hong Kong film star Leslie Cheung was taken from us too early due to depression. But the body of work that he left behind is still widely praised today. Double Tap appeared in 2000. In it Cheung plays a sport shooter of extraordinary skill. The resulting film is a twisting crime thriller with the kind of action that was Hong Kong’s trademark. It represents a very different take on the heroic bloodshed genre. At the time western film critics compared it to The Matrix – since the US film was influenced by Hong Kong cinema. Double Tap has rightly been favourably compared by film critics to A Better Tomorrow – which starred Cheung and Chow Yan Fat.
Useful tools.
Knowledge search
Back when I worked at Yahoo!, one of our key focuses was something called knowledge search. It was searching for opinions: what’s the best dry cleaner in Bloomsbury or where the best everyday carry items for a travelling executive who goes through TSA style inspections a few times a week. Google went on to buy Zagat the restaurant review bible. Yahoo! tried to build its own corpus of information with Yahoo! Answers, that went horribly wrong and Quora isn’t much better. A more promising approach by Gigabrain tries to do knowledge search using Reddit as its data source. I’ve used it to get some quick-and-dirty qualitative insights over the past few months.
Digital behaviour ‘CliffsNotes’
Simon Kemp launched this year’s Digital 2025 compendium of global online behaviours. It’s a great starter if you need to understand a particular market.
Encrypting an external hard drive
I needed to encrypt an external hard drive to transfer data and hadn’t used FileVault to do it in a while. Thankfully, Apple has a helpful guide buried in its support documents. From memory the process seems to have become more complicated over time. It used to be able to be done by using ‘control’ and click on the drive before scrolling down. Now you need to do it inside Disk Utility.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my March 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and enjoy the Easter break.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.
Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.
GLP-1 permission as a post came out of a walk in west London. Chelsea is a wealthy area of the city, with neighbourhoods made up of hedge fund managers, hereditary rich locals, captains of industry like INEOS’ Jim Radcliffe and wealthy foreigners who live in the UK on a seasonal basis.
Zeitgeist
This means that health clinics and pharmacies in the area can successfully sell services to private customers. So I wasn’t surprised to see a pharmacy offering a service to help with weight loss. These adverts are tapping into a global need to combat obesity. A sign of how big using GLP-1s for weight loss and weight management was an advert run during the Super Bowl by Hims & Hers. GLP-1 pioneer, Novo Nordisk for a brief time was the most valuable company in Europe, even more valuable than French luxury conglomerate LVMH.
And for well-off people, going private gives GLP-1 permission when used under the guidance of a healthcare professional to be used for aesthetic reasons rather being solely focused on the medical benefits of reducing obesity.
All of which makes sense why you would see weight loss consultations / services promoted at a pharmacy in Chelsea.
What the advertising got right?
Looking at the copywriting itself, it is solutions-focused with a clear call to action to speak to a member of staff to find out more. The copywriting is very much in line with CAP guidelines and ABPI guidelines.
What the advertising got wrong?
Policing of UK advertising seems to have created a belief that we suddenly operate in a more permissive regulatory and legal environment. GLP-1-based treatments have had some of the biggest commercial and cultural impact since Pfizer launched their erectile dysfunction treatment Viagra.
But despite these medicines being in the cultural zeitgeist there isn’t some exemption, a GLP-1 permission. GLP-1 weight management treatments are still prescription-only medicines and are still governed by the regulations that restrict branded communications to healthcare professionals (doctors, specialists, nurse prescribers, pharmacists) and patients that have already had the medicine prescribed to them.
Take this particular photo of the earlier poster series, In it you can clearly see the logos for both GLP-1 based weight management treatments. Both are prescription drugs, rather than over the counter medicines. This is illegal in the UK (and many other countries outside the United States).
At least we can say with some confidence that the notices were likely produced by the pharmacy, rather than facilitated by the pharma companies involved.
No pharmaceutical company would be pleased seeing their brand given equal treatment with a competitor.
If you are doing marketing for any business like this in the UK, know your CAP and ABPI codes.
