Category: on the sofa | 影評 | 영화를보고 | 映画レビュー

What does on the sofa mean? So a sofa is a couch in American parlance, or may also be called a settee or chesterfield in other English speaking parts of the world. Its the big chair in the living room that people tend to view their TV set from.

By using on the sofa as a title I wanted to imply content that I had reviewed at home rather than having gone out to watch it at a cinema or attend an event.

I have tended to review material on DVD or Blu-Ray rather than streaming media, usually because I have acquired them with an intent, whereas streaming is more like content grazing, often little more than visual wallpaper for my living room.

This section has been made up of a hodge podge of films, documentaries and anime.

Films that I have seen at festivals or on trips to the cinema are more likely to be in the out and about section. So there isn’t a consistency there in that respect.

I have covered a wide range of content here including

Safe House – a surprisingly good Ryan Reynolds film that isn’t a comedy one
Bitter Lake – I am a huge Adam Curtis fan and his work is the exception that proves my rule about streaming platforms in this section mainly because I can’t get his documentaries on disk
The Raid 2 – which added a bit of storytelling to the mix of The Raid.
The Man from Mo’Wax – a documentary about the rise, fall and reinvention of James Lavelle.
No blood no tears – An excellent Korean heist drama

June 2024 newsletter – legs 11
June 2024 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my June 2024 newsletter, it’s been a bit of a mad month with the European Union elections foreshadowing a rightward lurch in policy direction. The snap call for a French general assembly election and the bizarre spectacles happening in the campaign efforts of the UK general election. And before you say it, the UK general election is not a TikTok election. In the northern hemisphere midsummer (21 June 2024) – the longest day of daylight taps into something primal bringing us back to nature with campfires to meet the dusk, seasonal food and the beauty of summer on display.

This newsletter which marks my 11th issue. The number 11 is a mixed bag associated in medieval theology with the ’11 heads of error’. However there are more positive associations for those who believe in numerology. In Chinese its sonic similarity to the phrase ‘definitely fine’ gives it a positive association. For me it’s forever associated with the old bingo call of ‘legs 11’.

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.
- Collapsing the funnel is a term that I have heard thrown around a lot on blogs, LinkedIn posts and podcasts, but what does it really mean?
- A slower take on Apple’s iPad Pro launch
- A few things I learned judging the 2024 UK Young Lions and Adforum PHNX advertising awards, together with a few inspiring entries.
- The reasons why some people believe that #theinternetisdying.
- IT director powers up and more stuff – a collection of interesting news and analysis around the web, including how AI is upending IT sales.
Books that I have read.
- Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. Perlstein is an American historian with a progressive eye on history. His book name was passed around earlier on in the spring given perceived parallels between Biden and a likely second Trump administration, together with increased activism. It is one of a series of books that Perlstein wrote documenting post-second world war. Reaganland documents the Carter administration and America’s pivot to Reaganism. Before The Storm which looks at the rise of the modern American libertarian conservative moment and the decline in cross-party consensus – viewed through the lens of Barry Goldwater’s campaign to become the republican party candidate against Richard Nixon. I started reading Nixonland before the US college protests started, which gave the book added resonance.
- Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino. The first thing that jumps off the page when reading Cinema Speculation is the deep abiding love that Tarantino has for film. Film permeated every part of his life. His Mum took him along to films at the cinema that he probably shouldn’t have been allowed to see. In this respect he was a cinema media consumer in a time when mainstream television had already eaten Hollywood the first time around. The second thing that comes through is the way his deep knowledge allows him to build connections and linkages in non-obvious ways. Something that we lose the ability to do as we mediate knowledge seeking through Google and Perplexity instead of going through library newspaper clippings and reading magazines. I then realised that was a similar red thread in Perlstein’s Nixonland. Tarantino writes how he speaks and I was able to devour the book in two sittings despite suffering from a summer cold at the time. If you like to hear someone writing passionately about the New Hollywood movement of the early 1970s, then read Cinema Speculation.
- It was third time lucky for me with Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado. I was recommended the book by my friend Ian Wood and tried to read it a few times, but only really got into it at the third attempt. Once I got into it, I enjoyed it. There are the surface comparisons with Stig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (The girl with the dragon tattoo and sequels). Without giving plot spoilers I found this comparison lacking. Instead I think of it as a modern-day version of the Sherlock Holmes novels of Arthur Conan-Doyle, but that view may change as I work my way through the series.
Things I have been inspired by.

Bad Times Disco.

Bad Times Disco put together eclectic parties bringing out music like Japan’s 1980s ‘city pop’ sound and art to secret venues.

Joe Haupt – Vintage Disco Sound Novelty Transistor Radio, AM Reception Only, Made In Hong Kong, Circa 1970s

For their closing event until autumn in Hong Kong they had developed an equitable pricing policy that allows an equally eclectic crowd.

Come join us for our season closing party on June 21st, in a spacious and very central location, filled with BTD regulars, our loving staff, and a great lineup of vinyl-centric DJs. More than a party, BTD is truly a community and we want to see all the regulars for this one.

* Multi-functional space layout *

* Special set design, group exhibit of multidisciplinary art, and more special touches *

* Sober friendly party *

Presales: 270HKD

Phase 1: 330HKD

Phase 2: 380HKD

Last min: 420HKD

Solidarity ticket: 500HKD. If you are a landowner, homeowner, or have generational wealth, please consider purchasing a solidarity ticket to our party and making it possible for lower-income folks to attend the party.

*Limited Low Income Ticket*: 150HKD – This is *only* if you are a service worker in Hong Kong, working class, or unemployed without a safety net in Hong Kong. We will trust you to choose this option for yourself if you need it.
Season Closing: Bad Times Disco 21/06

Design Discoveries: Towards a DESIGN MUSEUM JAPAN.

Japan House London has an exhibition of industrial design that reflects on the paradox of Japan having great design, but not a museum of design. Japan has a culture of good design; it’s a living thing and expected. By comparison, the celebration of good design could ironically indicate a norm of mediocre to bad product design. The exhibition runs until September.

Digital mortality.

David Webb is a long time activist investor in Hong Kong. I know of him by reputation since before I first went to Hong Kong and China in the mid-2000s. He has a long-running website that is invaluable for all things Hong Kong business-related – and is likely even more valuable given the recent regulatory and legal changes in the city. In a time when Hong Kong’s retail investors are disadvantaged by the large families and opaque Chinese government, Webb-Site is one of a few assets that retail investors can use for research. The site shows its late 1990s web design roots and makes extensive use of RSS to power its content.

David has been receiving treatment for cancer since 2020 and is now thinking about how his website might live on as a crowd-sourced online database. At the moment he is looking to bring on board volunteer editors. Part of the reason for this is that the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission didn’t embrace XML data output, that sites like David’s could ingest and process. More details here on how you can get involved.

Kantar’s blueprint for brand growth.

Kantar’s blueprint for brand growth uses a decades worth of its client’s data to refine their approach for success. It broadly meets what you would expect from the marketing science corpus built up by the likes of Ehrensberg-Bass and the IPA. They boiled down this blueprint for brand growth into three points
- Predispose more people – which boils down to a mix of salience and fame.
- Be more present – which equates to marketing penetration to capitalise on the increased number of people predisposed to the brand.
- Find new spaces – this is about innovating in communications and new ways of achieving market penetration.
This last point is particularly interesting. Much of Kantar’s clients would be mature well-known brands so breaking out into new spaces represents a blue ocean approach, designed to move beyond the fractional gains against entrenched competitors.

Michael Page 2024 talent insights

Michael Page have launched their annual talents insights report. It has content on a diverse set of areas including working locations (remote, hybrid and on-site), artificial intelligence and perceived job security. TL;DR – hybrid seems here to stay, AI usage is in the minority at the moment and the majority of workers feel secure in their current roles.

Quiet pride.

Probably not the right section in this newsletter, it would fit better in a section of ‘things I have been disappointed by’. Campaign Asia and Campaign US ran the following article: Brands plan for a quiet Pride Month. The iPA ran a similarly themed article. I guess ‘pride washing’ of brands will be less of a problem this year, but the lack of visibility is a concern.

Scott Beale

The articles imply a wider rollback from brand purpose, indicating a hollowness to the buy-in from large corporates.

The hesitation around Pride may also be related to executives’ increasing reluctance to speak out on social issues more broadly. Wolff pointed to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, which found that 87% of executives think taking a public stance on a social issue is riskier than staying silent. “Essentially, nine out of every 10 executives believe that the return on investment for their careers is not worth the support during this turbulent time,” said (Kate) Wolff. “This is clearly problematic for both the community and the progress we have made in recent years.”
Brands plan for a quiet Pride Month – Campaign Asia.

It offers a different angle on the broader issue that people like Nick Ashbury with his new book The Road to Hell have been driving at with regards the state of brand purpose.

Things I have watched.

I am a bit of a Federico Fellini fan and finally got to watch Roma. Roma is semi-autobiographical in nature. It is a series of vignettes all based around the city of Rome which go from the 1930s to the 1970s and cover various parts of city life with some of the aspects such as Roman frescos turning to dust on first viewing in a millennium to a religious fashion show having an especially fantastical aspect to it. The deconstructed nature of the film is also interesting from a storytelling point-of-view.

Delicatessen was part of a wave of dystopian movies that were produced during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Films like Richard Stanley’s Hardware and Dust Devil. Given that its French there is a distinct mid-century modernism sensibility to many aspects of it such as the vehicles use. In terms of the plot it is similar to a futuristic Sweeney Todd meets Brazil. The directing and writing team Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro went on to make more popular films including City of Children.

THX 1138 was George Lucas’ first professional film based on his student film. It feels modern and fresh despite being shot in the early 1970s. It captures the impersonal socially isolating aspects of modern technology. The film proper opens with Robert Duvall speaking with a system about how he is feeling echoing the nascent current use of AI for therapy. While Lucas became famous from his directing of the film, a good deal of credit is due to Walter Murch’s futurist soundscape and Lala Schiffin’s tonal soundtrack which isn’t that far away from the likes of Jóhann Jóhannsson. It’s no coincidence that later on Lucas named his audio company THX.

Murch although less well-known is a multi-Oscar award-winning film editor and sound mixer who pioneered the use of Apple’s Final Cut software in Hollywood.

I got a good deal of my license fee’s worth of the BBC going through the 1960s Royal Shakespeare Company performances of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard III which together make up the telling through an English protestant lens of the War of The Roses. Peter Hall’s direction is spot on. I only wish that I had seen this while I was studying English literature in secondary school.

Useful tools.

Basic Excel formulas guide.

Nicolas Boucher usually works with finance teams looking at adapting AI, but he put together a PDF with 21 Excel commands and examples. Some of them can be handy in digging your way through quantitative data. You can get your copy of the PDF here.

Bookfinder

The everything store Amazon, a fair few times hasn’t had what I wanted. There are also sound moral arguments to want to buy elsewhere, or you might want to buy cheaper. That’s where Bookfinder comes in. It is fast, has a front end that looked basic back when when Netscape Navigator was your tool for coasting on the information superhighway and surfing the worldwide web.

LittleSnitch 6.

If you’re a long time Mac user who can remember back when Adobe creative suite came in a box, then you might know Little Snitch. It was popular for people running bootleg copies of PhotoShop and InDesign by stopping the software from ‘phoning home’ to Adobe.

In reality Little Snitch is so much more, it’s my go-to software firewall. It allows Mac users to retain a fine control on what goes in and out of your computer stopping dodgy connections in their tracks.

Additional MagSafe 3 cables.

I have a surplus of USB-C chargers now, but the move towards the MagSafe 3 charging connection on newer Macs is a great back to the future move. They are magnetically connected, allowing the connection to be broken before your laptop is dragged to the floor like the original MagSafe connectors that Apple had in two versions from 2006 to 2017.

They got rid of it, and long time users like me moaned about it as USB-C, felt like a backwards move for mobile workers. Apple brought it back with MagSafe 3, which now works with USB-C chargers.

Third-party MagSafe 3 cables are now available so you no longer need to pay the Apple tax of premium priced cables. My favourite is the BeckenBower USB C to Mag-Safe 3 Cable, which has worked out really well for me so far.

Organiser.

I work from home and usually have Bloomberg or Yahoo! Finance on in the background at a very low volume ambient noise if I am not listening to podcasts. I had the classic living room problem of hunting down remote controls to turn devices on and off. I was inspired to build on existing behaviours of looking around the TV first for the remote control and bought an organiser to hold them and a supply of spare AAA, AA batteries and the lightning cord for my Apple TV remote. The one I eventually settled on was Blue Gingko Multipurpose Caddy Organiser. It’s well made from plastic and thoughtfully designed which is why I was prepared a bit more to get something made in Korea, rather than made in China.

If you are using it for artwork or as a go pack for a workshop you can stack several on top of each other.

The sales pitch.

I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

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

Don’t forget to like, comment, share and subscribe!

Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
June 26, 2024
April 2024 newsletter – no. 9
April 2024 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my April 2024 newsletter which marks my 9th issue. We managed to make it through the winter and the clocks moved forward allowing for lighter evenings in the northern hemisphere.

The number nine is full of symbolism in a good way. In Chinese culture it sounds similar to long-lasting. It was strongly associated with the mystical and powerful nature of the Chinese dragon. From the number of dragon types and children to the number of scales on the dragon – which were multiples of 9. You have nine channels in traditional Chinese medicine. In Norse mythology there are nine worlds and Odin the all-father hangs on the tree of life for 9 days to gain knowledge of the runes.

Social media-related cognitive dissonance

A couple of conversations with people, spurred me to write this next piece.

I know it’s obvious and common sense, but it needs to be said occasionally. This time last year, I was on a Zurich work trip, providing support to a teammate running a workshop for a client who viewed the agency as the least worst option. We did good work and built temporary rapport, we got insight about the wider client-side politics at play. It was the classic example of the complexities involved in agency life and Lord knows we already have enough internal politics in our own shops to deal with.

The photo I shared on Instagram at the time gave no clue to what was happening, serving as a reminder to consider the curated nature of social feeds when scrolling through.

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.
- Fads versus real trends
- A quick guide to jargon used in pharma marketing.
- What my answers to Campaign’s a-list questions would look like.
- Boutique e-tailers and why the multi-brand luxury retail sector has gone from boom to bust.
- Very Ralph and other things – Ralph Lauren’s world building abilities and how others from a cancer patient or overseas migrant workers have bent the world to their needs, or made a new one.
Books that I have read.
- There are a few books that I revisit and the March 1974 JWT London planning guide is one of them. In many respects it feels fresh and more articulate than more modern tomes.
- Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism by Angela Zhang sounds exceptionally dry to the uninitiated. But if like me, you’ve worked on brands like Qualcomm, Huawei or GSK you realise how much of an impact China’s regulatory environment can have on your client’s success. Zhang breaks down the history of China’s antitrust regulatory environment, how it works within China’s power structures and how it differs from the US model. What becomes apparent is that Chinese power isn’t monolithic and that China is weaponising antitrust legislation for strategic and policy goals rather than consumer benefit. It is important for everything from technology to the millions of COVID deaths that happened in China due to a lack of effective vaccines. Zhang’s book won awards when it first came out in 2021, and is still valuable now given the relatively static US-China policy views. Given the recent changes in Hong Kong where she lives, we may not see as frank a book of its quality come out of Hong Kong academia again on this subject matter.
- Van Horne and Riley’s Left of Bang was recommended by a friend who recently left military service. It codified and gave me a lexicon for describing observations of focus group dynamics and observation-based shopper marketing. Probably of bigger value to people more interested in the analytical side of behavioural science is the bibliography – which is extensive.
Things I have been inspired by.

Sustaining a sustainable brand

Kantar do a good webinar series called On Brand with Kantar. I got to watch one of them: Why consumers ignore brands’ sustainability efforts. Consumers are reticent to trust in brand’s sustainable efforts. Kantar’s recommendation is to stay the course and continue to demonstrate real sustainability. Kantar’s work complemented System 1’s Greenprint US-orientated sustainable advertising report. There is a UK-specific version as well with half a dozen ideas for marketers published in partnership with ITV.

Media platform trends

GWI released their 2024 Global Media trends report. GWI takes a survey based approach to understand consumer media behaviour.
- Broadcast TV still commands the greatest share of total TV time, despite Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and a plethora of other streaming platforms from Criterion to Disney+.
- Survival/horror players are most excited about gaming luxury collabs, whether or not luxury brands are equally excited about survival or horror gamers is a bigger question.
- Games console ownership has halved in the past ten years. This surprised me given how many of my friends have a Switch or PlayStation 5. It probably explains why Microsoft is focusing on being a publisher rather than on platforms as well.
Japanese online media spend

Dentsu published a report looking into 2023 Advertising Expenditures in Japan. A couple of interesting outtakes.
- They focused exclusivity on internet advertising, which gives you a good idea on where they want the balance of media spend to go, rather than necessarily the right tool for the right job. Yes digital is very important, BUT, we live in a world were we are wrapped by and consume layers of digital and analogue media.
We can see from GWI data that this viewpoint is likely to be still excessively myopic in terms of media due to offline – online media linkages. This is likely to be even more so in Japan that still has a more robust traditional media industry.
- Internet advertising reached a new high, despite being a couple of years after the Olympic games were hosted in Tokyo. (Media spend when a country hosts the olympics tends to be skewed that year upwards).
One thing I would flag is that this report is based on surveying people across the Japanese advertising industry and built on their responses. So there maybe some biases built into that process. Overall it’s a fascinating read.

Social media engagement benchmarks

RivalIQ published their 2024 Social Media Industry Engagement bench report, download it to get the full details. Three things that struck me straight away:
- Macro-level decline across platforms on engagement rate, which matches the trends that Manson and Whatley outlined ten years ago in their Facebook Zero paper for Ogilvy Social.
- If brands didn’t need enough reason already to reduce exposure to Twitter, the falling engagement rates on the platform add additional reasons. Overall video seemed to underperform on engagement compared to photos.
- One thing leaped out to me in the industry verticals data, if you are looking to reach student age adults, why not consider collaborating with higher education institution social media accounts rather than influencers?
Shocking health outcomes

The Hidden Cost of Ageism | A Barrier to Innovation & Growth | Future Work – sparked a lot of discussion with its implications on workplace practices, particularly within the advertising sector. What was less discussed but more important was the implications of ageism related biases on healthcare treatment.

Under-treatment or Over-treatment: Older adults may receive less aggressive treatment options or are overtreated because of age-related biases, rather than based on individual health needs and preferences.

Dismissal of Concerns: Healthcare providers might dismiss older patients’ health issues as inevitable parts of ageing, potentially overlooking treatable conditions.

Age-Based Prioritisation: In some cases, age influences the allocation of healthcare resources, with younger individuals being prioritised over older ones, assuming they have more “life worth living.”
The Hidden Cost of Ageism | Future Work

MSNBC News in the US did a report on what it called a ‘Post-Roe underground’ echoing the underground railroads to free slaves in the Southern states and the Vietnam war era draft dodgers who escaped north to Canada. This time it is to help women access abortion pills or procedures in other states or Mexico.

MSNBC

My friend Parrus hosted a talk on World Health Day, more on that here, the key takeaway for me was not trying to replicate developed market solutions in developing markets. Instead think about how it could be reinvented. Thinking that could be extended beyond health care to consumer goods, telecoms and technology sectors as well.

Luxury market shake-up

Business of Fashion covered a US court case where two women brought a lawsuit against Hermès, alleging purchase of its sought-after Birkin bag is dependent on purchase of other products and is an “illegal tying arrangement” that violated US antitrust law.

Hermès is more vulnerable than other brands because it owns its retail stores. The case, if successful could have implications far beyond the luxury bag-maker. For instance, how Ford selected prospective owners for its GT-40 sports cars, or most Ferrari limited edition for that matter.

While we’re on the subject of luxury, LVMH are rerunning their INSIDE LVMH certificate which is invaluable for anyone who might work on a luxury brand now or in the future. More here.

Morizo

Toyota are on a tear at the moment. They correctly guessed that electric cars were too expensive at the moment and focused hybrids as a stepping stone to electric and hydrogen fuel cell production. They have also successfully use the passion for driving in their products and their marketing. The Toyota GR Yaris was a result of Chairman Akio Toyoda instructing engineers to make something sporty enough to win the World Rally Championship and affordable.

He also outed himself as a speed demon who went under the nom de plume of Morizo.

Quebec

For many English speakers one of the most dissonant experiences is being confronted by a language you can’t speak. It’s part of the reason why ireland managed to become the European base of companies like Alphabet and and Intel. So I was very impressed by this campaign by the Quebec government to attract visitors and inbound investment.

Things I have watched.

I watched Mr Inbetween series one in March and managed to work through series two and three this month. I couldn’t recommend them highly enough as a series. They just keep building on each other.

Over Easter, I revisited some old VHS tapes my parents still had and rediscovered the Christopher Walken science fiction horror film “Communion.” It epitomizes its era, with alien abduction narratives emerging during the Cold War and permeating popular culture from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “The X-Files,” tapering off after 9/11. “Communion” demonstrates how effective editing and minimal special effects can heighten tension and emotion. Despite the film’s incredulous premise, Walken delivers a fantastic performance.

“Modesty Blaise” is from a time when comic book adaptations were uncommon in cinemas. This 1966 adaptation of the 1960s comic strip shares stylistic similarities with “Barbarella” and stars a young Terence Stamp. I received a tape copy from a friend who was attending art college at the time. The depiction of the computer as a character with emotional reactions in the film feels contemporary, echoing the rise of virtual assistants like Siri and ChatGPT, despite being portrayed as a mainframe. It is interesting to contrast it with Spike Jonze’s movie Her made 50 years later.

Useful tools.

A lot of the tools this month have been inspired by my trusty Mac slowly dying and needing to get my new machine up and running before my old machine gave out.

Time Machine

Apple’s native backup software, Time Machine, serves as a personal sysadmin for home users. Regular backups are essential. If a crucial document disappears while you’re working on it, Time Machine, coupled with a Time Machine-enabled hard drive, allows you to retrieve earlier versions of the document, potentially saving your sanity in critical moments.

Microsoft Office

I prefer the one-off payment model over Office 365 services. I use Apple’s Mail, Contacts, and Calendar apps instead of Outlook. While Office is available for just £100, which is reasonable considering its features, I still prefer Keynote over PowerPoint for creating presentations.

Superlist

Many of you may recall Wunderlist, which Microsoft acquired, but much of its original charm was lost in the transition to Microsoft To Do. Superlist is a reboot of Wunderlist by the original team, this time without Microsoft’s involvement. It’s available on iOS, macOS, and the web, catering to both individual and team task management needs.

https://youtu.be/2MzzbRhYlSA?si=04eBXH-MqKLpX2bN

ESET Home Security Essential

I used to rely on Kaspersky, and while I generally like their products, I have concerns about the potential influence of the Russian government. Therefore, I switched providers. ESET has a strong reputation and offers better Mac support than F-Secure. I can recommend their ESET HOME Security Essential package.

Amazon Basics laptop sleeve

I use a various bags depending on my destination and activities. Over the years, I’ve found that Amazon Basics brand laptop sleeves work well for my machines. They’re often among the cheapest options available and tend to outlast the computers they protect.

Laptop camera cover

The photo of Mark Zuckerberg’s laptop with tape covering the camera raised awareness about privacy. Webcam privacy covers, such as a sliver of plastic that slides across, are ideal as they allow your laptop to close fully. A pro tip is to use a red LED torch to clearly locate your camera when applying the stick-on cover.

Protective case and keyboard cover

I’m a big fan of clip-on polycarbonate shells to protect my laptop, as they provide a better surface for the stickers that personalize my machine over time. You don’t necessarily need a big-name case. The one I have came with a keyboard cover that works well. Anything that prevented Red Bull, coffee, or croissant flakes from getting under my keys is worth doing.

Screen protector film

The screen protector film provides great protection and is easy to apply and clean, even for beginners like me. I’ll update you if my opinion changes.

The sales pitch.

I have enjoyed working on projects for PRECISIONeffect and am now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my April 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the bank holiday.

Don’t forget to like, comment, share and subscribe!

Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
April 25, 2024
Morizo and more things

Morizo

Akio ‘Morizo’ Toyoda, of the Toyoda family who made their first fortune designing automatic textile looms in the early 20th century and their second fortune as the founders of Toyota. During the week Toyoda-san is the chairman of Toyota Jidōsha kabushikigaisha. But in his spare time he liked to do circuit racing under the name Morizo. At first, the Morizo name was to keep his moonlighting racing of the radar of Toyota board. But recently it has become an asset, with Toyota and its GR performance brand creating some of the best drivers cars available.

Toyota have started to use his natural enthusiasm for the company’s benefit. The Lexus LBX Morizo RR is currently a concept car that sees a baby Lexus LBX SUV benefit from the mechanicals of a Toyota GR Yaris.

Although talk about this as a Morizo only concept, it feels like the company might be feeling consumers out to possibly put this into manufacturing. If they did this, it would allow the company to take advantage of the GR Yaris-only components currently made and use them more widely.

The Criterion closet

Criterion as a publisher of DVDs and Blu-Rays is a badge of quality. The closest equivalent in the UK would be Curzon who bought Artificial Eye a number of years ago. One of the things Criterion do is video taste-makers who are allowed to take away some of their favourite films away from the company’s stock. Here are a couple of my favourites.

William Dafoe

Hideo Kojima

Watch trends

While much watch collector videos know feel more like Bloomberg reporting on a commodity because of the rise in the secondary market, this wrap-up strikes a nice balance. Some of the factors mentioned in this review appeared in my 2023 wrap-up and here.

Mexican street culture

If you had uttered those words to me before this week, I would have immediately thought of saints festivals, the day of the dead and the Chicano culture that grew out of Mexican communities who emigrated to the US. But there is so much more in Mexico itself as Refinery 29 shows in this film.

The 50 French words test

You can imagine the brief that came down to this government department in Quebec: make more English speaking visitors and businesses come to our province. The insights being along the lines of most English speakers don’t feel confident dealing with a foreign language, so how to do demystify French.

I don’t know who the Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie used, but they deserve every penny of their fee with this film.

April 2, 2024
February 2024 newsletter – No.7
February 2024 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my February 2024 newsletter which marks my 7th issue. I hope that your year of the dragon is off to a great start.

The number 7 is a bit of a mixed bag, depending on how you look at it. In the old testament, the 7th heaven is where God’s throne is, alongside the angels. It had been considered a place of happiness, hence Gwen Guthrie’s Seventh Heaven. In Mandarin, the number is considered generally a positive thing, the number is a homophone for ‘arise’ and ‘life essence’. But that’s only half the story.

Indications of 7’s unlucky nature include the seventh month in the lunar calendar being a ‘ghost month’. In Cantonese, it is a homophone for a vulgar way of saying penis. I hope your February wasn’t a dick of a month.

For film buffs it’s almost 28 1/2 years since the transgressive crime thriller Seven was released. It was a break out hit and became the seventh highest grossing film of 1995, behind Die Hard with a Vengeance, Toy Story and Apollo 13. It beat out other films like Braveheart in box office earnings, but Braveheart ran away with the Oscars.

Let’s hope that feng shui master Michael Chiang is correct in terms of the positive energies from the year of the dragon.

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.
- FOOH – and the ethical and marketing challenges it presents with a thought experiment harking back to the golden age of pornography.
- Technonationalism – how current technological developments mirror the cold war and the 20th century Asian economic miracle.
- Innovation signalling – how innovation is used by brands for show, rather than for genuine progress.
- Pipes by Yahoo – a remarkable web service that also causes us to reflect on the post modern web of today.
- Hong Kong measurements – how something as simple as measurement units are a melding of culture, history, modernity and politics in a time of change.
- Y2K was always more than a fashion phase, but it seems to have faded from the zeitgeist which means the fashion takes have no context. Here’s a bit of context for you.
Books that I have read.
- What the Taliban Told Me by Ian Fritz. Fritz writes really, really well, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been able to complete his personal memoir about his upbringing, service in Afghanistan onboard an AC-130 gunship and depression. In some ways it reminded me of Jarhead – Anthony Swofford’s memoirs of his life up to the time of being in the US Marines during the first Gulf War. Swofford’s book came out a decade and a half after his service. Fritz’ book feels much more immediate and without the flashes of humour and beauty that was in Swofford’s book.
- Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China by Leta Hong Fincher. This was originally written in 2016, but has been updated to incorporate changes over subsequent years. It shows how government policy, ethnographic-nationalism, law enforcement, the legal system, collective punishment and community pressure is applied on modern women. I still find the content covering domestic violence shocking. This isn’t the China of Mao where in theory women hold up half the sky, instead it seems to be on a trajectory that would eventually see it closer to Mao’s view of China’s population, or Ceaușescu’s Decree 770 and ot h er associated pro-natalist laws. This is a world away from the equally oppressive one-child policy, which had been brought in to deal with population related problems from the Mao-era.
- The Big Book of Cyberpunk edited by Jared Shurin. I am huge fan of cyberpunks better known authors: William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling. This collection of 100+ stories written by authors from 25 countries is a mixed bag, but that’s no bad thing.
Things I have been inspired by.

~~J Walter Thompson~~ ~~Wunderman Thompson~~ VML Intelligence launched their annual Future 100 report. It’s a great read and its continuity over the years makes it stand apart from the plethora of trends reports that get published every year. Their trends which intersect luxury and health are particularly interesting:
- Althluxe
- Bioharmonizing spas
- Longevity resorts
- Idyllic idleness
Author Cory Doctorow’s essay for Locus magazine plays devil’s advocate in considering the future of the crypto-based ecosystem and artificial intelligence is well worth a read. Doctorow speculates on what kind of bubble artificial intelligence is likely to become and the effect that its deflation may have. He draws on the outcomes of tech bubbles in the past including the dot com bubble and the telecoms bubble that accompanied it.

Just Conecting published a report on what seems to work on LinkedIn. It’s an interesting snapshot of what works at the moment, I am sure things will change over time as the algorithm evolves. Much of the focus seems to be orientated towards personal branding over business brands.

Over at Japan House, I marvelled at the exhibition Ainu Stories: Contemporary Lives by the Sara River. The Ainu are native to Japan’s northern islands and have survived for millenia in the extreme cold. Historically they were discriminated against, but now there is an appreciation of their culture. The art pieces on display are unique in their design, but share the attention to detail one sees in other Japanese work.

The Science Museum has an amazing exhibition on: Zimingzhong 凝时聚珍: Clockwork Treasures from China’s Forbidden City. Prior to the opium wars, UK craftsmen created fantastic clockwork-powered creations that were given as gifts to the emperor of China. The exhibition finishes on June 2, 2024. I went during Chinese new year. I came away with a refreshed appreciation of modern watchmaking complications, in particular devices like ‘minute repeaters’.

NS Lyons magnus opus The China Convergence is read by Regina Doman. Lyons’ premise is that western systems have converged with China’s approach to governance due to the rise of the technocrat. In this respect his perspective is similar to that shared by documentary maker Adam Curtis. Like Curtis, Lyons’ The China Convergence asks uncomfortable questions of us. Are we basically a less extreme version of the same system to the presses of mass and scale?

While we’re talking China, I can recommend the China Update YouTube account that provides a concise summary of Chinese business news and economic analysis garnered from a wide range of Chinese and western business publications.

Finally, IPSOS ongoing collection of reports this time reflects on the power of nostalgia. This time focusing on youth culture from cottage-core, Barbie mania, vinyl to vintage technical clothing and streetwear and the underlying drivers behind it. Why Nostalgia Is So ‘Fetch’ Right Now by Samira Brophy is well worth a read.

2023 Global Trends Report by ACROSS Health is a great census of healthcare professional media preferences and insight into omnichannel communications trends for pharmaceutical marketing. It is good reading and indicates that pharma clients who have an excessive efficiency bias and want to go to digital-only customer journeys will be left behind by peers taking a mixed approach.

Things I have watched.

Agent Hamilton – Carl Gustaf Hamilton is a Swedish answer to James Bond or Jack Ryan. Hamilton was the main character in a series of books written by a former investigative journalist, Jan Guillou, who served time in Sweden for exposing illegal intelligence operations. Guillou wrote the first Hamilton book in 1986 and the last one in 2012.

Blake and Mortimer – if you’re a fan of TinTin, you’ll like Blake and Mortimer as both come from the French -Belgian comic tradition. This cartoon series is based on the adventures of an eminent Scottish scientist and a British military intelligence officer in mid-century Europe. It’s nice light entertainment and I can recommend the graphic novels as well of which there are now 30+ stories including the Before Blake and Mortimer off-shoots. The authors have also wrote other excellent series like XIII.

Useful tools.

Audio Hijack 4.3

Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack has been a mainstay on my Mac for far more years than I care to mention. It was great for everything from recording conference talks to putting together quick and dirty talk tracks that concepting films can be cut too. Version 4.3 features OpenAI’s Whisper transcription software that can cater to transcribing dozens of languages. I have found it better than tools like Otter.ai for me.

Krisp

Krisp.ai is a freemium service providing intelligent noise cancellation, call transcripts and meeting notes all in one. It works with Teams, Google Meetup, Slack and Zoom.

Obsidian

Just like Evernote back in the day, Obsidian has become a bit of a cult app for those that find it really useful. At its heart, it is a note taking and writing application. It will sync between desktop and mobile devices, but that costs $8/month – which is expensive. I haven’t been using it beyond a quick trial, as I have a well-defined set of tools that I use and Obsidian didn’t really slot in well. But I can appreciate the value of it to others. One thing I would be leery of, if you are moving to Obsidian is the cottage industry in snake oils salespeople hawking the ‘ultimate’ online course for Obsidian. Instead check out Obsidian’s own community pages of courses.

Todoist

Todoist is a shareable to do list that places it somewhere between quick and dirty project management and personal productivity. I am giving it a try following a recommendation from a friend. It’s not about whether products like this are good or not, but usually if it fits into your style of working, so your mileage may vary.

Personal Update.

More details on the awards here.

The sales pitch.

Now taking bookings for strategic engagements (from the end of April onwards) or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done to date here.

The End.

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

Don’t forget to share and subscribe!

Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
February 28, 2024
December 2023 newsletter
December 2023 newsletter introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Being thankful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things I have been inspired by.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sailor Moon drawings from the animation cells

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

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

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

But Ged, why no Christmas adverts?

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

RTÉ television

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

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

Things I have watched.

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

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

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

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

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

Useful tools.

TeuxDeux.

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

EmbedResponsively.

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

FREEKey system

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

Infogram

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

Control Panel for Twitter

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

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

Cyberduck

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

The sales pitch.

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

More on what I have done to date here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my December 2023 newsletter. Be excellent to each other, have a great Christmas and New Year, I look forward to seeing you back here in 2024. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. See you next month!
December 19, 2023