Ged Carroll

Category: online | 線上 | 온라인으로 | オンライン

The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.

Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.

Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.

Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.

Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.

  • December 2024 newsletter

    December 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my December 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 17th issue. MIT computer students described 17 as the least random number following research asking respondents to provide a number between 1 and 20, 17 was the most popular answer.

    In some Chinese dialects 17 can be considered unlucky as it sounds similar to ‘life of anger’. I am hoping for a life of relaxation rather than a life of anger over the Christmas holiday period.

    Christmas lights in the garden

    I have found London to be cold, but not necessarily crisp, but the dark days will start to become lighter soon.

    Whatever the holiday season throws at you, and whatever your favourite festival of choice to celebrate 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).

    My strategy fam: Parrus Doshi, Lee Menzies-Pearson, Sarath Koka, Colleen Merwick, Rob Fuller, Alice Yessouroun, Zoe Healey, Ian Crocombe, Michael Zarri and Calvin Wong, MBA.

    My clients and partners this year including: Craft Associates, Havas, PrecisionAQ, & TANK Worldwide.

    Other smart people in and around the industry: Stephen Potts, Darren Cairns, Robin Dhara, Nish Lad, Katy Howell, Nigel Scott, Rory Natkiel and Tom List.

    Things: WARC, the IPA., IPSOS and Meltwater.

    With that done, let’s get into the December 2024 newsletter!

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here. 

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    Things I have written over the time covered by this December 2024 newsletter.

    I will be dropping my review of 2024 on December 31st (technology permitting); here’s my review of 2023 to give you a feel about what you can expect to see.

    Books that I have read.

    I have been a bit slack on reading this month, but have made up for it with film recommendations below.

    • I am stilling reading it at the time of writing, but I am really enjoying reading The Peacock and The Sparrow by I.S. Berry. The book rides a resurgence of espionage as a genre. Unusually for books it covers the early 2010s in Bahrain with a clear-eyed look at the civil disturbance that happened at the time. Obliquely, the book also deals with the post-petroleum phase of Bahrain’s development. Bahrain is a former petro-state that has now pivoted to Gulf area tourism and related services industries.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    2025 trends reports.

    Matt Muir of Web Curios fame reminded me of the annual strategy and ad planners ritual of collating annual trends reports. While they aren’t the most scientific piece of work, they give you a good idea of what the corporate publishers who paid for them think in terms of:

    • What they think their future business looks like
    • What they think they need to say to remain relevant in the next year

    Thanks to Ci En Lee and Amy Daroukakis who help wrangle this effort.

    Things I have watched. 

    Election 2 – Johnnie To’s trouble with the Hong Kong and Chinese government following his interview with the BBC meant I bought a lot of films I will be sharing here over the next few months. I watched Election last month and followed it up Election 2. The sequel focuses on Louis Koo and Nick Cheung’s characters from the first film amongst others. It’s a film that pulls less punches and alludes to the machinations of how the Beijing government captured control of the Triad groups in Hong Kong. Needless to say, unlike the first film less than two years earlier, Election 2 didn’t get released in China.

    The Hitcher – The Hitcher is an amazing film for a number of reasons. Rutger Hauer’s performance as John Ryder is amazing. You have a really taunt horrific thriller of a story, completely at odds with the film’s 15 certificate. The story is matched by a director who wrung a big production out of a small budget. The cinematography at times is breathtaking, shot in the deserts of California. When it got released on Blu-Ray I had to watch it.

    I vividly remember the first time I watched it, with my mate Joe. His folks were away for the weekend and we hit the local convenience store bought an armful of snacks and fried up a packet of Bird’s Eye frozen paella prior to sitting down and watching the film. We were glued to the screen watching a rental VHS copy of The Hitcher. My friend Joe’s house backed on to a copse and a couple of tramps dossed in the small wood during the summer. While we were watching the film, a vagrant tried his back door, which was locked and scared the living daylights out of us. We ran him off wielding whatever we had to hand in the kitchen. I had to lock all my windows and doors before I pressed play this time around.

    Rare Exports – Rare Exports is an amazing Christmas film made in Finland. It’s funny, touching, action-filled and horrific. It’s a modern twist on the Krampus legend.

    Troll Hunter – Troll Hunter is a Norwegian film borrowing from the found footage genre including the likes of The Blair Witch Project and Canniblal Ferrox. A documentary film maker seeks to find out more about a mysterious hunter who is thought to poach bears out of season. The reality is far darker.

    Useful tools.

    Maven

    If you’ve followed technology and social platforms for the past three decades you’ve probably heard the name Ev Williams. He was one of the founders of Pyra Labs who developed the Blogger platform that powered Google’s blogspot.com blogs, publishing platform Medium and microblogging platform Twitter. Maven is his latest social platform looking to provide a healthier alternative to other platforms focused on the dopamine hit triggers of followers, likes and comments.

    It’s too early to see whether Maven will be successful, and people have lots of platform choices from BlueSky, Threads and Mastadon to Reddit. Give Maven a try here.

    The sales pitch.

    I have enjoyed working on a number of projects for Havas and 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.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my December 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into 2025.

    Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

  • Revenge on society + more stuff

    Revenge on society

    China has had a number of ‘lone wolf’ attacks on the public all of which had a common theme of ‘revenge on society’. It might be that the perpetrator had economic setbacks or a sense of being wronged by a government decision that set them on this direction.

    The profiles of the attackers are often middle-aged men. The revenge on society attacks all seem to be driven by people who feel that they have little to lose. While attacks that meet the revenge on society profile have been documented at least as far back as 2004. There seems to have been an acceleration in the occurrence of revenge on society attacks in 2024. Unlike Uighur related incidents of 2013 and 2014, there isn’t a particular group that China can suppress to reduce the incidents easily. Revenge on society attacks are more likely to be dealt with using mass-population surveillance and reporting a la Minority Report’s preventative crime approach and raised security.

    Raising security against revenge on society attacks requires a mix of infrastructure investment like bollards

    Police car

    A Suzhou school bus was attacked by a knife-wielding attacker looking to kill and maim Japanese children. He killed the school bus attendant who defended the children from his attack.

    September 18th saw a 10-year old Japanese child was stabbed to death by a 44 year-old man. Anti-Japanese sentiment is fanned by Chinese government rhetoric and a constant barrage of content on Chinese media. The attack happened in Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong.

    On September 31th, 3 were killed and 15 injured by a revenge on society attacker in a Shanghai branch of Walmart. He had been arrested by police who said that he was angry due to a personal financial dispute.

    The following day on October 1st, while most were celebrating China’s national day holiday – Chinese man conducted a revenge on society attack in Zurich, Switzerland. He attacked and injured three children near a daycare centre. He was a postgraduate student who publicly expressed extremist nationalist views.

    A 60-year old man convicted of previous attacks stabbed two students and one woman outside a primary school in Guangzhou on October 8th.

    On October 28th, a 50 year old man attacked and injured three children and two adults in Beijing in an attack that had all the hallmarks of revenge on society.

    A revenge on society attack on November 11th killed 35 people and injured 43 more because the 62-year old attacker was unhappy with his divorce settlement. The Chinese government attempted a news blackout of the incident. The incident happened in Zhuhai, a city just across the border from Macau.

    On November 16th, a Wuxi third level education college was the site of an revenge on society incident that killed eight people with a knife attack and 17 others injured. A 21 year old male was detained.

    On November 19th, the 39 year-old perpetrator drove into students arriving at a primary school in Changde. He was eventually stopped and beaten by a crowd until being taken into custody by the police.

    Words of the Week: “Revenge on Society” Attacks Lead to Government Monitoring of “Individuals With ‘Four Lacks and Five Frustrations’” (四无五失人员, sìwú wǔshī rényuán) | China Digital Times

    Consumer behaviour

    How many toys is too many? | Vox – One reader told Vox recently that her family was “absolutely drowning in toys.” And while adults have been complaining about kids’ junk for generations (please see my father’s fruitless search for my brother’s one-inch-long toy wrench in Los Angeles International Airport circa 1992), many millennial and Gen X parents have the sense that something is different now — that kids have more toys than in past decades, and that they seem to arrive in ways Randall describes as “unintentional” and Parents Are Stressed About Playtime. Their Anxiety Is a Goldmine. – WSJ – same as it ever was

    Could shifting beauty standards have predicted Trump’s win? | Dazed

    Economics

    Putin’s «Deathonomics» – Riddle Russia – the Kremlin seriously expects a positive economic outcome from the creation of a high-salaried contract army. If we assume that the number of mobilised and contract-based soldiers ranges from 400,000 to 450,000, then their minimum total allowance will amount to approx. 1 trillion roubles a year. The government will have to allocate about the same amount for compensations in case of killed or wounded soldiers, even if there are 50,000 or 100,000 such people in a year. These sums represent nearly 10% of pre-war federal spending, and some people are already predicting the emergence of a social group of «the young rich» and even making plans for how this money will contribute to long-term investment programmes. – Deathonomics is allowing the Russian government to shape its population pyramid to reduce the burden of the aging population on the economy.

    The costs of maritime supply chain disruptions: The case of the Suez Canal blockage by the ‘Ever Given’ megaship – ScienceDirect

    Endless business closures, through the eyes of a Chinese consumer | Following the Yuan

    Ideas

    If an alien could speak, could we understand it? – Leeds Trinity University Research Portal

    How These Men Left the Manosphere — and Why Some May Never | Teen Vogue – “The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms and say, ‘this is where you belong. If those people don’t understand you, they’re just a bunch of triggered snowflakes or whatever,’” Miller-Idriss says. Another tactic, she says, is to point out the commercialization of the manosphere in which everything is for sale including courses, supplements, and crypto-currencies. Pointing out the profit motive of these influencers can be effective, Miller-Idriss says.

    That’s part of what got Tom out of the manosphere, which he says he fell into when he was 27, after leaving the Army and finding himself “stuck trying to look for work consistently, having basically no social support, having no options other than to just work, pay bills, work, pay bills, in an increasingly difficult world to do that.” He was lonely, he says, and the influencers he followed had some pretty good talking points, he thought: men were more affected by things like incarceration rates, workplace death and injury rates, and mental health and no one was taking it seriously.

    “The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms.” Pasha Dashtgard, an assistant professor at the Polarization & Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, says this is a common entry point. “They start their conversations with, ‘men are in crisis and no one’s talking about it. It’s like, that’s true, men are in crisis and we should be talking about it… [but] that opens up, ideologically, the door for them to be like ‘and now, here are the solutions’ and it’s this horrible, toxic nonsense.” But after after a couple months in the manosphere, Tom realized that, while men’s health is a serious subject, he wouldn’t find the answers he was looking for in the manosphere, which was overrun by what he calls “grifters, frauds, or sort of religious zealots.” Now, Tom says he doesn’t actively use the label ‘feminist’ but “considers it part of my worldview.”

    Indonesia

    Indonesia rejects Apple’s $100 million investment offer | Techxplore

    Luxury

    From Edition to Ritz Carlton, how global luxury hotels are localizing their strategies amid expansion | Jing Daily – interesting comment on staff as ‘intelligence agent’

    Marketing

    Is there a future for personalisation? | WARC – Right person, right place, right time: for over a decade this idea has been an ideal in advertising. But an alternative point of view is that personalisation is self-defeating because advertisers chase a moving target when they are unable to prove return on investment. 

    Patagonia’s Restructuring Has Led to Employee Fallout – Business Insider – Patagonia’s historic worker commitment is less well known than it’s sustainability credentials which probably explains why recent moves haven’t led to the kind of brand dissonance amongst consumers that the likes of Bud Light or Nike experienced.

    Jaguar rebrand

    Jaguar’s teaser campaign for its rebrand and new vehicle model prompted immediate feedback. I am not clear on what the ask was by the marketing team, so have kept an open mind. Here offered without comment are some of the related commentary:

    Media

    Baidu Q3 2024 earnings| CNBC – the interesting bits in here are static online marketing business revenue and increasing AI / cloud services business

    AI-Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide

    The Rise, Fall, and (Slight) Rise of DVDs. A Statistical Analysis

    Online

    How a 15-Year-Old Gamer Became the Patron Saint of the Internet | WIRED

    The Fantasy of Cozy Tech | The New Yorker – cozy gaming came from COVID and Animal Crossing – gaming and cute

    Let’s check in on MrBeast – by Taylor Lorenz – User Mag

    Retailing

    Ted Baker relaunches website in the UK – Retail Gazette

    Security

    China’s Surveillance State Is Selling Citizen Data as a Side Hustle | WIRED

    Philippines recruits civilian tech talent to fend off cyber attacks – Rest of World

    How Silicon Valley is prepping for War – by Michael Spencer

    Software

    Apple Working on ‘LLM Siri’ for 2026 Launch – MacRumors

    HarperCollins Confirms It Has a Deal to Sell Authors’ Work to AI Company

    Style

    Streetwear Has Lost Its Popularity. Is That a Good Thing? | HighSnobriety – if it kills drop queues I’ll be happy

    Technology

    Qualcomm – Falling Behind or Laying in Wait? | Digits to Dollars

    Telecoms

    I Don’t Own a Cellphone. Can This Privacy-Focused Network Change That?

    Web-of-no-web

    Meta brings certain AI features to Ray-Ban Meta glasses in Europe | TechCrunch

    Receiver enables dead reckoning when GPS/GNSS fails | EE News

  • Klad + more stuff

    Klad

    Klad is a new trends in illegal drug distribution. Klad sprang out of the online anonymity of the darknet. Breaking Klad: Russia’s Dead Drop Drug Revolution | Global Initiative goes into detail about how the Klad system works. Klad seems to be the narcotics equivalent of an Amazon locker. The customer pays the money via a dark web service and is directed to a concealed geocache with their product in it. These caches are refreshed by low level network members whose soul role is to service the klad network.

    Understanding Russia’s darknet markets and the logistics systems underpinning it offers insight into the future of drug trafficking (and other crimes) worldwide.

    Klad is likely to be further complicated by the tight linkage between the Russian state and international organised crime groups.

    China

    Blackpink’s Lisa ignites controversy on Chinese socials with cabaret performance | Jing Daily – an old article but shows the tension of feminist and male-centric themes, modern mindset versus tradition.

    Consumer behaviour

    The Future of Men from TEDWomen 2017 – by Jack Myers

    Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events – The Lancet Planetary Health – more data supporting the idea of climate despair – poor mental health related to concerns about climate change.

    The Game Theory of Democracy – The New York Times – Adam Przeworski developed a theory that democracy is best understood as a game, one in which the players pursue power and resolve conflicts through elections rather than brute force. Democracies thrive when politicians believe they are better off playing by the rules of that game — even when they lose elections as it maximises their self-interest over time. It works when the stakes of power remain relatively low, so that people don’t fear electoral defeat so much that they seek other methods reversing it. Winners of elections need to act with restraint. They can’t make life miserable for the losers, or foreclose the possibility that future elections would allow the losers to win. But recent years suggest that even “working” democracies can be far more fragile than was once believed; Przeworski doesn’t see an obvious way to protect it from being weakened further.

    Using F-word at work is no sacking offence in the north, rules judge | The Times – As rude as the comment was, the so-called f-word had become commonplace “in the public sphere” — and that was particularly the case in the north of England. “Mong” is a derogatory term for someone with a learning disability, especially related to Down’s syndrome, and is also used as a synonym for “idiot”. Shergill was hearing a claim from Robert Ogden, who was said to have made the jibe during an office discussion about doughnuts and losing weight. His colleague was said to have felt “violated and shocked” by the remark and was left in tears before reporting Ogden to bosses, who eventually sacked him. Ogden is now in line for compensation after the judge ruled that his “lawless and toxic” office was rife with similar comments.

    Design

    Ideas We Love: Re.Uniqlo Studio

    Energy

    Norway’s electric car sales set new world record | VoA

    Finance

    Inside Goldman Sachs’ years-long power struggle over its China venture FT – Goldman Sachs had their face ripped off and they are still enthusiastic about the Chinese market. Senior executives gave themselves bonuses while the business shelled out a billion dollars for very little. In addition, looking at market timing it’s unlikely Goldman Sachs will realistically get the kind of returns their shareholders would want ever.

    FMCG

    Starbucks needs to cut the crap from its brand positioning | MarketingWeek – Starbucks is more than coffee. It does have brand appeal. But it’s more basic than its highfalutin mission would have you believe. It’s a combination of being in the right places to answer the right category needs at the right time, with a small but not unimportant wedge of American quality and efficient delivery.

    There is plenty of brand equity in Starbucks, it’s just apparent that Starbucks never actually worked out what it was. Professor Dolly Parton has the best definition for positioning: find out who you are and do it on purpose. To use her analogy, Starbucks never got to first base never mind second.

    Yes, Starbucks grew under Schultz’s second tenure. He was an exceptional leader twice over. However, there was a vacuity within the brand that was palpable when you entered its stores. The commoditisation of Starbucks that Schultz spotted so brilliantly continued, offset by other excellent decisions that kept it growing.

    The brand’s nonsensical mission statement did not harm it. It did not lose the company money. But its fundamental stupidness and overreach meant that the potential benefits of a more prosaic, practical, accurate position were missed. A problem deferred. Contrast with Why am I optimistic about Starbucks China ☕ | Following the Yuan

    Gadgets

    Why has the Internet of Things failed? « Pete Warden’s blog

    Interesting video by The Verge that covers how supply chains are crippling cassette players and compact disc players. Bottle necks include magnetic heads, cassette mechanisms (one factory in China makes a bad dupe of an old Japanese company design), laser pick-ups and compact disc mechanisms have a similar problem. The programme also misses out that the likes of Dolby Labs no longer licence their noise reduction technology.

    Health

    Telehealth’s GLP-1 ‘gold rush’ is powered by these medical groups | STAT News

    Hispanics and Mental Health: Gaming as a Pathway to Self-Care | Ideas Exchange by Klick Health

    Hong Kong moves to restrict business use of medical terms such as ‘treatment’, ‘clinical’ | South China Morning Post – Under the planned ban, which has already been added to the Private Healthcare Facilities Ordinance but not yet enforced, premises other than licensed healthcare facilities or exempted clinics would not be allowed to use terms such as “clinical”, “healthcare”, “medical”, “treatment” and “therapeutic”. Currently, it is not uncommon to see such descriptions used in non-medical settings. An online check by the Post found a gym claiming it could offer “targeted pain treatment” with a procedure called myofascial release. Another centre also claimed to treat various pain conditions “commonly seen in the city” by stretch therapy.

    Hong Kong

    Trump, Harris both like ‘poison’ for Beijing, says former top US envoy to Hong Kong | South China Morning Post – while the story leads on Kurt Tong being the former US consul general – you could rewrite the precise of the article as head of strategic advisory firm advises Hong Kong to employ advocacy tactics to detoxify Hong Kong government reputation in Washington (presumably including lobbying and think tanks).

    Innovation

    Watching Nintendo think out loud about radar and music (Interconnected)

    Marketing

    Great video hosted by Kantar featuring Mark Ritson on the benefits of consistency in brand building. I can’t embed here, you have to go to YouTube to watch it.

    Huddle 001 – Is strategy sick? – Outside Perspective

    Media

    OnlyFans Has Paid $20 Billion to Creators Since 2016, CEO Says | Variety

    Retailing

    Asos CEO ‘not worried’ about Vinted or Shein despite mounting losses | Retail Gazette – interesting. I wonder how the brand building work is going? I have seen lots of ads, but they’ve felt disjointed and flat

    John Lewis partners with Klarna for ‘buy now pay later’ option – Retail Gazette – the middle class now need the digital equivalent of ‘lay away’ – not a great economic indicator

    Security

    Chinese Group Accused of Hacking Singtel in Telecom Attacks – Bloomberg

    Software

    Split mixed tracks with LANDR Stems | SOS – this is huge

    Style

    Kizik Hires Nike Footwear Veteran Andreas Harlow as SVP of Design – Footwear News – moving prior to the new CEO Harlow was responsible for design of the Jordan line of footwear, but makes sense when you read my John Donahue and Nike related post.

    Technology

    She Built a Microcomputer Empire From Her Suburban Home | Every

    Telecoms

    Interesting article on the state of the internet. It looks as if the network might be maturing: Is the (US) Internet Really Slowing? – On my Om

  • Ghost signs + more stuff

    Ghost signs

    I took this picture almost two decades ago on a visit to Hong Kong of ghost signs.

    Former industrial units in Fotan

    I was reminded of this picture when I watched the below documentary on ghost signs. Specifically it reminded me of the former industrial units I saw in Fotan, which is in the New Territories of Hong Kong. Their structure used as a giant billboard advertising their former uses making fur coats or plastic flowers. The ghost signs of Hong Kong were fast-fading evidence of an industrial golden age in Hong Kong extinguished by China’s entrance into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at the end of 2001.

    The UK ghost signs highlighted in the documentary benefit from a slower rate of building replacement and a more temperate climate that helped preserve lead paint over a century old.

    Ghost signs show that history is all around us, if we care to look around us.

    Beauty

    Avon mulls franchise stores and widens tie-up with Superdrug | Retail Gazette

    China

    Volkswagen China CMO deported from China for drug use | News | Campaign Asia – Volkswagen Group China’s chief marketing officer, Jochen Sengpiehl, has been expelled from China following a positive drug test upon his return from a holiday in Thailand. This development has caught significant attention on Chinese social media, as reported by the German tabloid Bild-Zeitung. AFP reported that German officials confirmed the news on Tuesday. Sengpiehl was detained for over 10 days and instructed to leave the country immediately after Chinese officials detected traces of cannabis and cocaine in his blood, according to AFP’s coverage. He was held in custody before Volkswagen and officials from the German embassy managed to secure his release. However, he was required to leave the country instantly, as reported by Bild. Campaign Asia-Pacific reached out to Volkswagen Group for comment. A global spokesperson offered a terse response: “We ask for your understanding that we will not comment further on the content of your questions in light of our contractual and data protection confidentiality obligations.” The incident throws a harsh spotlight on the differing legal landscapes around drug use. While Germany legalised cannabis use earlier this year, and Thailand became the first Asian country to decriminalise it for medical purposes in 2022 (though recreational use is slated for prohibition by the end of the year), China maintains extremely strict anti-narcotics laws, with severe penalties for violations. – This also says a lot about how little China needs Volkswagen in the country now.

    Why Are Airlines Quiet Quitting China? | Skift

    Consumer behaviour

    Gen Z’s joy in chaos: Why maximalism is back | Jing Daily – at odds with the sleek pared down looks currently driving Chinese fashion. Not really that much of a surprise given how young people over the years have rated thrift shops, army surplus stores and shopped while travelling in search of authenticity and a story behind their eclecticism.

    54: Double 11 (Is Ralph Lauren a victim?), The fall of Will’s and ClassPass | Following the Yuan – Chinese consumers using returns policies to hit ‘boycotted’ western companies in the pocket by exploiting the elevated business costs of returns in e-commerce. Double 11 or singles day is one of the premier shopping days in China. If this movement is real, the results for targeted brands like Ralph Lauren would be exceptionally brutal.

    Culture

    Camcorders are now going through a ‘lomography‘ phase now – where creators love their limitations and flaws.

    Finance

    Hong Kong exchange launches crypto index for Asia | Tech In Asia

    Luxury

    Why do people queue up outside luxury stores? | FT

    Kering and Hermès tell tale of luxury inequality | FT

    Marketing

    Why global brands are failing in Africa | WARC

    Beyond the horizon: The holistic path to measuring media investments | WARC

    Online

    Preparing for Apple & Google’s certificate lifespan changes | The Stack – interesting that this transition is being compared to Y2K in terms of technology experience disruption

    Security

    TSMC cuts off Chinese chip designer linked to Huawei • The Register

    Software

    OpenAI and Anthropic present two possible futures for AI – The Verge

  • October 2024 newsletter

    October 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my October 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 15th issue. This is the second year that I have written about Hallowe’en sharing my Mam’s recipe for barmbrack – an Irish household standard. When I lived in Hong Kong, the locals enthusiastically adopted western Hallowe’en culture with local amusement parks Ocean Park and Hong Kong Disneyland competing to create the scariest experience for young people and dating couples. They mixed western and local horror motifs. It’s amazing how thanks to the mass media Hallowe’en has become a global cultural event. More on that later.

    As for the significance of the number 15? It seems to have deep significance in modern culture with a wide range of artists including Taylor Swift and Marilyn Manson using it as the title of songs, albums or mixtapes. Additionally, the number has some significance in Judaism. The number 10 represents the hand of God and the number 5 represents to save or rescue. If we add 10 plus five, we get 15. The symbolic meaning of 15 translates to “mercy,” which means compassion and forgiveness.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here. 

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • An honest review of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 – which is as much a critique of wearables as a category, as the device itself.
    • Cocaine Cowboys is a book on Irish crime, but the title is as interesting as the book in terms of its particular cultural resonance in Ireland and a reflection of the Irish experience.
    • Nike changes CEO John Donahue, as it faces unprecedented challenges due to unforced self-inflicted strategic errors.
    • Pagers and more things can be found here.

    Books that I have read.

    • Taylor Lorenz’ Extremely Online is a history of the social web from bloggers to the present day. Lorenz’ telling is very US-orientated but an interesting account of how influencers and brands evolved their social presence adapting to platform changes such as the disappearance of Vine. Aspects that I found fascinating included how influencers accelerated their following through offline events rather similar to Japan’s idol industry and the career resilience of the Paul brothers
    • The Murderers by Frederic Brown provides a criminal side view to a story in a world that one would recognise from James Ellroy‘s neo-noir crime world of Los Angeles.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Tourism Ireland: Halloween.

    halloween
    Tourism Ireland

    Hallowe’en was a huge part of my childhood in an Irish household, bairn brack and tea, going around and collecting apples, dried fruit and hazelnuts from neighbouring houses, carving out a turnip lantern, making a papier-mâché mask, enjoying ghost stories on RTÉ radio and strange noises that came from the worsening weather and wildlife. However, America seems to have defined a lot of the narrative and globalised behaviours around the festival.

    Living in Asia, I saw revellers in Hong Kong and Japan enjoy the festival and borrow heavily from Hollywood from ET to the Halloween franchise. Like Irish-American cuisine, American Halloween is based on the European traditions brought to the new world and then reinterpreted.

    So I was fascinated to see Tourism Ireland’s campaign to reclaim Halloween from internally pervasive American soft power and Hollywood; going back to the festival’s pagan origins.

    Meaningful patient engagement

    Measuring and Demonstrating the Value of Patient Engagement Across the Medicines Lifecycle is a call to action to assess and measure patient engagement for the pharmaceuticals industry. It redefines the concept of patient-centricity – a popular concept that has become increasingly prominent and popular in the industry. (Disclosure, the paper involved a couple of former Concentric HX Wegovy launch colleagues: Fay Weston and Zoe Healey).

    The Change Makers

    Brand purpose has lost a good deal of unalloyed credibility in marketing circles (for some very good reasons). But that doesn’t mean that consumers got the memo. Havas’ The Rise of the Change Makers report looks at change through this lens. Like the Edelman Trust report, it has tracked the change in consumer zeitgeist over the past few years.

    Social effectiveness

    There was a couple of interesting research papers in the International Journal of Advertising. Firstly, digital detoxing by consumers seems to have a temporary inoculation against social media advertising when they return to using a social platform. Secondly, romance sells, or the psycho-romantic aspect of parasocial relationships sells – which should be taken into account when weighing up influencers that brands might want to partner with.

    Things I have watched. 

    Series three of ITV’s Van Der Valk’s reboot is a sleeper series that I have enjoyed watching with my Dad. Season 4 has debuted in the US on PBS, but there is no sign of it being picked up in the UK yet.

    Barry Foster
    Barry Foster

    The series is based on a series of thrillers written in the 1960s by Nicolas Freeling; the first one was Love in Amsterdam. The original TV adaptation featured Barry Foster as Van Der Valk whose performance gave the original show a unique look-and-feel.

    I watched some vintage Jack Ryan with a young Ben Affleck playing the CIA analyst in an adaption of The Sum of All Fears. This version is usually overlooked in favour of the modern TV series and the Harrison Ford films. Alan Bates played a delicious villain; an Austrian politician with far right tendencies. Bates’ character felt the most prescient of all the characters, while the thawing relationship with Russia feels further away with each passing week. Unfortunately, the franchise was left on the shelf for a while after this film was made; Ben Affleck made a good Dr Ryan and Liev Schreiber was a good foil as character John Clark – the real muscle in Tom Clancy’s books.

    Amazon Prime Video has some sleeper films if you dig around. Deliver Us From Evil is a respectable Korean action film with the classic ‘tragic hero’ plot line popularised in Hong Kong and Japanese cinema. While it has been compared to The Raid, there is an Old Boy feel to the violence. Much has been made of it starring Lee Jung-jae – known to global audiences for his role in Netflix’ Squid Game. It’s just under two hours of enjoyable escapism.

    I rewatched Inception for the first time since I saw it in the cinema. Since then we’ve had COVID and a generative AI-filled media sphere and the film hit different. It no longer felt exceptional in the way that films like Blade Runner and the Studio Ghibli back catalogue still do.

    Il Divo was one of a couple of DVDs that I bought instead of paying the Netflix tax. Il Divo appealed to me because of my love of real-life Italian intrigue, sparked by watching The Mattei Affair for the first time several years ago. I became reacquainted with it more recently again when I rewatched it. Il Divo covers the political intrigue of the 1970s and 1980s, in particular Giulio Andreotti, an Italian prime minister and failed presidential candidate. At the time Italy suffered from far left terrorist attacks and a reactionary right-wing movement that revolved a freemason lodge known as P2. Andreotti’s leadership is directly linked to a succession of deaths of enemies and associates during his career – which the film displays in an artful tableau at the beginning.

    It is a very complex time in modern Italian history and the story tries to pull different strands of the story in through different vignettes. Like The Mattei Affair before it, a certain amount is left up to the audience’s interpretation.

    Central Intelligence

    Not television, but my current favourite show on BBC Radio 4 is Central Intelligence, which is part of their Limelight drama content. I love it for a few reasons:

    • I grew up with cold war-era espionage books and The Troubles in Northern Ireland, so the security services stories owned a bit of real estate in my head. Given the way things have been going over the past decade, this kind of world has been raising its head again.
    • It’s a really well researched show with high production values on the history of the CIA told from the prospective of Eloise Page who joined the agency at its start and had a 40-year career.
    • Fantastic voice talent. Accomplished high profile film actress Kim Cattrall who has appeared in iconic film and television roles playing both comedic and meaty characters. Ed Harris is a fantastic, but less well known actor who appeared in classic movies from The Right Stuff and Walker to portraying The Man in Black in the Westworld TV series.

    Useful tools.

    Downloading images on a web page

    Imageye is a browser extension that helps you download all pages on a given web page. It can be handy for mood boards and social research.

    Getting to Heathrow

    I have had to do a bit of travel. Thankfully it has been well planned. One of the things that helped my planning and saved money is the Heathrow Express’ £10 Advanced Discounted Tickets. More details on the caveats surrounding the discount here.

    Buying cheaper

    MoneySavingSupermarket has a search engine of products available via Amazon Warehouse. If you’re a jobbing freelancer or just looking for something for your home – it allows you to buy that item a bit cheaper.

    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.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my October 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into November, but not before you’ve charged your energy levels up on Hallowe’en treats!

    Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!