Category: oprah time | 書評 | 서평 : 文芸批評

Welcome! I guess the first question that you have is why oprah time? Well in my last year of college I used to sit in the house that I shared with my landlord and write my essays whilst watching cable TV.

There I would be sipping tea, writing away and referencing from text books spread around me on the couch and coffee table. One of the programmes on the in the background was Oprah Winfrey. A lot of the show was just background noise. But I was fascinated by Oprah’s book club.

She’d give her take on a book, maybe interview the author. And then it would be blasted up the New York Times bestsellers list. This list appears weekly in the New York Times Book Review. Oprah’s book club was later emulated by other talk show hosts, notably the UK’s Richard Madeley and Judy Finegan.

On the high end you had Melvyn Bragg‘s South Bank Show when they profiled an author of the moment.

When I came to writing my own review of books that I’d read, I was was brought back to that time working on a sofa. Apple laptop in hand. It made sense to go with Oprah time.

You might also notice a link called bookshelf. This is a list of non-fiction books that I have kept. And the reasons why I have kept them.

If you’ve gone through my reviews and think that you’d like to send me a book to review. Feel free to contact me. Click this link, prove that you’re human and you will have my email address.

September 2025 newsletter
September 2025 introduction – (26) pick-and-mix edition

Where has the year gone? I am just thankful that we got a little bit of sun, given how fast and hard the autumn wind and rain came in this year. I am now at issue 26, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘pick and mix’.

When I was a child ‘pick-and-mix’ sweets were a way of getting maximum variety for the lowest amount of pocket money that I earned from chores. Woolworths were famous at the time for their pick and mix section, alongside selling vinyl records and cassettes. Woolworths disappeared from the UK high street during the 2008 financial crisis.

For Mandarin Chinese speakers 26 is considered ‘lucky’ given that it sounds similar to ‘easy flow’ implying easy wealth.

This month’s soundtrack has been a banging digital compilation put together by Paradisco and Disco Isn’t Dead featuring The Reflex, PBR Streetgang, Prins Thomas, J Kriv, Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66.

Right, let’s get into it.

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.
- Decoding the complex and contradictory data around crime and its likely impact on consumer opinions.
- A post that took me too long to write about the favourite campaigns I had when on the jury of the PHNX awards.
- I missed sharing a post I wrote last month that built on the work of Rob Estreitinho on ideas for being a good strategist.
Books that I have read.
- I finished Moscow X by David McCloskey. (No plot spoilers). This is the second book my McCloskey after Damascus Station, which I read and enjoyed back in May last year. The book is like a more action-orientated American version of a LeCarré novel. The plot reminded me of LeCarré’s Single & Single and Our Kind of Traitor. McCloskey isn’t afraid to have strong female lead characters in his book.
- Y our Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall. Minshall is a professor at Cambridge and heads up the engineering department’s manufacturing research centre. Because of his mastery of the subject area, he manages to provide an exceptionally accessible primer in terms of what manufacturing is, how it happens and what it means. More about it here.
Things I have been inspired by.

Election-winning opacity in influencer relations

I have been following Taylor Lorenz‘ work since she became the beat reporter for online culture and technology at the Business Insider. Her article for Wired magazine on how the Democratic Party in the US is working with paid influencers makes for an interesting read.

What would be the norm in the commercial world about influencer transparency where there is a paid relationship – isn’t happening in politics.

Ok, why does this matter? The reason why I think this matters is that people who do their time in the trenches of a presidential election campaign have a clear path into a number of American agencies.

‘I’ve have won a victory for X candidate and can do the same for your brand’ has been a popular refrain for decades in agencies.

I have been in the room when senior American agency people have tried to convince Chinese companies to buy their services based on their success in marketing a candidate in an election using western social media channels. There was no sense of irony when this was awkwardly delivered as a possible solution for domestic market campaigns to marketing teams in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shanghai.

Bad habits will be brought into agencies and sold on to clients.

Chart of the month.

Kim Malcolm shared a great report done by Zappi and VaynerMedia looking at The State of Creative Effectiveness 2025. Two charts piqued my interest. The change in distinctiveness of advertising by age cohort.

The overall emotion that an advert evokes by age cohort.

Causality of these effects aren’t clear. Empirically, I know that great adverts still put a smile on the faces of people of all ages and can change brand choice, even in the oldest consumers.

I had more questions than answers. VaynerMedia thought that the answer should be cohort-specific campaigns. I am less sure, since brands tend to better within culture as a common point of truth for everyone. Also, I don’t believe in leaping to a solution until I understand the underlying ‘problem’.

I could understand a decline in novelty as people gain decades of life experience and will have seen similar creative executions before.

Are the adverts lacking a foundation in strong cultural insights and cues that would resonate with these older audience cohorts?

What I did notice is a correlation with the age profile in advertising agency staff compared to the general public and the point at which the drop-off to occurs. But correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation.

It’s concerning that advertising effectiveness declines in older audience cohorts as economic power skews older within the general population. This is likely to continue as millennials inherit wealth from their baby boomer relatives as they enter their 50s and 60s. Which makes the old marketer line about half of a consumers economic value is over by 35 seem hollow.

Things I have watched.

Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 1 and Border 2. In the GITS storyline this is a prequel to the original film. It follows how the eventual team comes together. The technology looks less fantastical and more prophetic each time I watch it. The animation is still spectacular.

Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 3 and Border 4. Following on from Border 1 and Border 2, this has Togusa and the Section 9 team following the same case from different ends – which eventually has Togusa joining Section 9 as its only unaugmented team member.

I bought up as many of the films I could in Johnnie To’s filmography after he criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview, which was likely to be the kiss of death to his film career. I finally got around to watching one of his best known films PTU and the series of Tactical Unit films that came from the same universe.

PTU: One of the paradoxes of Hong Kong is the prevalence of triad and corruption dramas, compared to the real life which whilst not crime and corruption free is much more staid. Hong Kong is as different from its cinematic counterpart, as the UK is to Richard Curtis’ films. PTU like Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is based around the search for a missing police pistol. PTU (police tactical unit) officers look to help out a detective from the OCTB (organised crime and triad bureau). While the film occurs over one night, it was actually shot over three years and is one of Johnnie To’s best known films. Shooting only at night, To provided the audience with a familiar, yet different, cinematic experience. The washed out colours of day time Hong Kong is replaced by vibrant signage and the sharp shadows defined by the street lighting. Officers walking with a street lamp lit Tom Lee music instrument store behind them, look like its from a John Ford scene in composition. Some of his tracking shots, due to the framing of photography and the distortions of the night give an almost Inception like feeling to the geography of Hong Kong streets, warping the horizon between buildings the night sky. PTU was successful internationally and then spawned, five further films from the same universe made in 2008 and 2009.

Tactical Unit: The Code was a one of a series of Tactical Unit sequels to Johnnie To’s PTU. In The Code several plot lines come together. The investigation of CCTV footage of officers beating up a triad , a police officer heavily in debt due to negative equity on his mortgage and a drug deal gone wrong. All this plays out in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong. When this film was made back in 2008, it would have been considered well done, but largely unremarkable. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.

Tactical Unit: Human Nature loses some of the cinematic feel of PTU. It’s not as masterful a film , BUT, the convoluted threads of the plot and the great cast who are now completely comfortable in their characters make it work well.

Tactical Unit: No Way Out. No Way Out starts with an impressive screne shot in Temple Street market. The film explores the Temple Street area of Kowloon and organised crime links to everything from cigarette smuggling to drugs.

Tactical Unit: Comrade in Arms is the penultimate in the series from the PTU universe of films. You still have the main cast of Hong Kong veterans Lam Suet, Simon Yam and Maggie Shiu. Plain clothes officer Lo Sa has been demoted to wearing a uniform and both Mike Ho and Sergeant Kat’s squads are still patrolling the Kowloon side of Victoria harbour. This sees the stars leave their usual urban beat and go into the hills of the New Territories after bank robbers. Much of it occurs in daylight, which sets it apart from the night time beat of PTU. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.

Tactical Unit: Partners. Partners is unusual in that it revolves around the challenges of the ethnic minorities that make up Hong Kong from romance fraud ensnaring filipina workers to discrimination against Indians and Nepalis. While some of the show happens during late on in the day, it still captures much of the night time feeling of the universe

2001 Nights is a 3D anime. While I admire the ambition and the technical expertise that went into the models, the characters as CGI fall down and distract from the storytelling. Also it felt weirdly like Space 1999 – and not in a good way.

Her Vengeance is a Hong Kong category III revenge movie filmed in 1988 that 88 Films recently release on Blu Ray. It borrows from another Hong Kong film in the early 1970s and I Spit On Your Grave. Despite being an low budget exploitation film it features a number of notable Hong Kong actors, probably because it was a Golden Harvest Production.

I found the film interesting because its opening was shot at Stanley Ho’s iconic Casino Lisboa in Macau. This was unusual because Hong Kong had lots of nightclubs that would have been fine for the protagonists management role without the hassle of the additional travel and government permissions. So we get a rare late 1980s snapshot of the then Portuguese colony.

When The Last Sword Is Drawn is a classic chambara (samurai sword-play) movie. It tells the complex story of a samurai, who unable to support his family on his meagre income as a school teacher and fencing master, turns his back on his clan and leaves to find work in Kyoto. Once in Kyoto he becomes embroiled in the battle between the declining Takagawa Shogunate and the Imperial Royal Family during the 19th century. Whilst the film does contain a lot of violence, it is used as a backdrop to the humanity of the main character and battles he faces between providing for his family and doing the honourable thing.

The plot is told through the recollections of others and finishes with the samurai’s youngest daughter getting ready to leave Japan with her husband and set up a doctor’s surgery in Manchuria (China).

Useful tools.

Playing Blu-Ray discs on a Mac

I have a Blu Ray player in my home theatre that enjoy using in lieu of subscribing to Netflix, which allows to me to explore more art house content than I can stream. Macgo Mac Blu Ray Player Pro gives your Mac the software capability that Steve Jobs wouldn’t.

One final thing, if you prefer to use Substack, you can now subscribe to this newsletter there.

The sales pitch.

I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my September 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Hallowe’en.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

Get in touch
September 26, 2025
Your Life is Manufactured
Your Life is Manufactured is written by Tim Minshall. Minshall is the professor of innovation at the University of Cambridge. He runs the Engineering department’s manufacturing research centre, so has a mastery of his domain. This is immediately obvious from his book, which he manages to write as an exceptionally accessible guide to what manufacturing is, how it is done and hints at why it’s important.

Before getting into the book to understand why it was so popular, I had a number of questions about the book:

What was Your Life is Manufactured purpose as a book?

Your Life is Manufactured looked to demystify how stuff is made. The book whilst accessible is aimed at adults and older children. Minshall keeps things very simple, only once touching on subject matter knowledge name-checking Japanese academic Noriaki Kano‘s work with a very simplified explanation of some of the principles of the Kano model of customer satisfaction.

His explanation as to why manufacturing is important is basically because everything around us is made. He avoids the economic reasons including:
- Increased economic productivity
- Increased growth
- Widespread employment for skilled workers
- The national security adjacent area of resilience
All of which are very important, pertinent points for the UK. Minshall’s choices about what he left out of Your Life is Manufactured is as interesting as what he left in. Whilst the book deplatforms the romantic notions of many environmentalists, Minshall assiduously avoids political territories.

Why is it needed?

When I was a child, I remember other children in my primary school didn’t know that milk came from a cow. They had no idea what happened before the jug of milk appeared in the fridge of their local supermarket. Urban living had divorced many people from nature.

I spent a good deal of my time on a small holding in the west of Ireland as a child, so got to see a cow being milked and the creamery tanker taking away from the milk from the churn to be processed. For those who hadn’t seen this process, city farms started to spring up as educational aids giving a basic if romantic view of farming life.

But we all had an intuitive view of what manufacturing was. While it seems arcane now Unilever’s local factory used to blow a steam whistle signalling the changing of a shift across its large industrial site. It marked the time when I set out around the corner to infant school.

Early on Sunday morning, there was a sharp blast which signalled the weekly cleaning out of the boilers, steam and smoke bellowed into the sky followed by the distinctive smell of the boilers contents.

There were similar sirens at the local shipyards and at other factories. Ships carrying cargo would regularly sound their fog horns. Lorries trundled in and out of factory gates and along nearby roads.

Large factories like the Shell Stanlow oil refinery, the Bowater paper mill and the Vauxhall car plant held open days where workers would take friends and family around the plant showing them what it did and inspiring young minds. Years later, as a student, one of my jobs was running the visitors centre for a terminal that processed natural gas.

There was innate curiosity about how things were made. I still have my collection of ‘How It Works’ encyclopedia that I had as a child. My parents sold the original early 1970s part works series in a cardboard box that my Dad had collected and sparked my interest in the version I now have, which we upgrade to when I was still in primary school.

During my career, I have seen several manufacturing processes including a giant printing works in Shenzhen, the infamous Foxconn factory complex and Global Foundries Dresden semiconductor fab.

Now with globalisation and delivery to the door many children of all ages are completely divorced from the means of production. Your Life is Manufactured is a small step in what would need to be a larger process to ground the general public in manufacturing and why it’s important, yet fragile.

Overall thoughts

That Your Life is Manufactured is considered a business book of note, says a lot about how deeply the British people are separated from how things are made – and that’s a frightening thought. Minshall’s book is a good first step in opening up British minds about manufacturing and its requirement of a place in our society. It’s immensely readable and woke me up to the collective ignorance surrounding me.

You can find more book reviews here.
September 25, 2025
August 2025 newsletter
August 2025 introduction – duck and dive (25) edition

This is the 25th edition of Strategic Outcomes. The first edition was quickly bashed out in a hotel room. And people signed up, and kept coming back. As I write this August 2025 has been a weird month with the weather throwing all the seasons at once at us from storms to heatwaves.

The bingo call for 25 – ‘duck and dive’ would have been equally appropriate descriptor for 2025 to date – with massive changes across current affairs, the economy and culture. It seemed to make more sense than calling this a ‘silver edition’.

25 evokes memories a of childhood Irish card game played with my Uncle and Granny on the formica top of the farmhouse kitchen table. Something I frequently did during August nights after a day’s work cleaning up after animals, feeding livestock and other tasks.

For this month’s musical accompaniment I can recommend St Etienne Take Me To The Pilot produced by Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll, which hits different to previous St Etienne records.

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.
- From the changing nature of motorsport fandom to do clients actually care about WPP’s organisational changes and new CEO?
- Hacks for moving city, from my time uprooting my life from London to Hong Kong and back again. These were and edited version of notes from an email I wrote years ago for a acquaintance who was moving to Shenzhen, soon after I had made the jump to Hong Kong. He is no longer with us, you may get some value out of them.
Books that I have read.
- I am currently reading David McCloskey’s Moscow X. The slow reading pace is more down to me rather than the accessibility of the book which is up to McCloskey’s usual high standards.
Things I have been inspired by.

Escalating trade tensions

GLG shared a discussion on escalating global trade tensions. I had a number of takeaways from it.

US trade war with China has devolved into a dangerous stalemate where neither side can back down without losing face.

The core conflict stems from China’s state-led industrial policy clashing with the rules-based system. The Trump administration’s rhetoric triggered China’s historical “century of humiliation,” making compromise politically difficult.

Key takeaways from the discussion:
1. China’s top demands aren’t about tariffs.
- Respect is paramount: China’s first demand for restarting talks is that the Trump administration speaks to them with respect and stops insults.
- Sovereignty is key: China insists on discussing Taiwan, which it views as its “most important and most sensitive issue”.
1. The U.S. is overstretched.
- Not enough negotiators: The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has only about 250 total employees.
- Outsourcing is unworkable: Using pro bono law firms to assist raises problems with security clearances and conflicts of interest.
1. The non-China strategy is different.
- A softer tone: The administration’s approach to allies like Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam is more ‘measured’.
- Quick deals: preliminary agreements with these nations that focus on tariff reductions, while punting more complex issues negotiations down the road.
1. Sector-specific US risks loom large.
- Technology: export controls on advanced chips and dumping of Chinese-made legacy chips used in cars and white goods.
- Autos: Highly integrated supply chains that cross borders, are very vulnerable to tariffs.
- Pharmaceuticals: Tariffs on generic drugs could become unprofitable and cause them to disappear from the U.S. market.
The state of AI in business

The Gen AI divide: state of AI in business 2025 | MIT was published and created an AI stock sell-off based on its top-line factoid: 95% of companies get zero RoI from GenAI.

But there was more interesting takeaways in the report that paint a more nuanced picture:

The “Learning Gap” is the real barrier.
- The primary reason AI pilots stall is that most systems don’t retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.
- While 70% of employees prefer AI for simple tasks like emails and summaries, 90% choose a human colleague for complex projects because of the learning gap.
Buy, don’t build.
- Internally developed tools fail twice as often as COTS ones.
- The data shows a clear winning strategy: pilots built through strategic partnerships with external vendors are twice as likely to reach full deployment as those built internally (a 66% success rate versus 33%).
Companies are making misplaced bets.
- An estimated 70% of AI investment is directed at high-visibility sales and marketing functions.
- The highest and clearest ROI in underfunded “back-office” areas. Some firms are saving $2-10 million annually in customer service and document processing.
These three points are good news for consultants, productivity suite vendors and enterprise software companies that really understand their clients workflow pain-points.

Chart of the month.

Actually two charts. The first one is a decline in conscientiousness. Depending who you believe this could be down to our always-on lives thanks to social media and smartphones, OR, a victim of the broken social contract that young adults (aka generation z) feel has happened.

A corresponding decline in US consumers reading for pleasure tends to imply a smartphone-related effect rather than broken social contract as cause. Also broken social contracts are depressingly common generation-by-generation.

Things I have watched.

The Iron Prefect was a film that I watched purely on the basis of a talk Alex Cox gave as part of the special features on the Blu Ray. The film is an account of a Fascist-era official sent to combat the Sicilian mafia who ends up finding how endemic and self-defeating his mission is. It is based on the story of Cesare Mori and some of his most famous acts such as the siege of Gangi. Cox talked about its similarity to The Mattei Affair – which I can see to a certain extent, in terms of the themes explored. The film features Claudia Cardinale and Giuliano Gemma – two greats of Italian cinema. But the real star is the scenery.

Hong Kong Hong Kong is a tragic romantic triangle about mainland migrants with a social realism bent. It was shot in 1983, but didn’t have the escapism of more popular films in the Hong Kong box office at the time.

The film is similar in feel to the likes of the kitchen sink dramas of 1960s kitchen sink dramas like This Sporting Life, and John Huston’s boxing drama Fat City. It shows a different side to Hong Kong cinema than western audiences were used to. It came out the same time as Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain and Jackie Chan’s Project A. Hong Kong Hong Kong benefited from the free flow of rostered actors attached to TVB – the dominant broadcaster being able to work for Shaw Brothers film productions. Protagonist Alex Man, like other stars of his era including Chow Yun-fat and Simon Yam Tat-wah came through TVB’s acting school that nurtured talent from all walks of life from first-jobbers, to former models and policemen.

Man brought experience from television and stage roles to his film performances which makes Hong Kong Hong Kong more powerful.

Finally 1980s the city of Hong Kong itself plays a fantastic role to the drama. From the opening tracking shot taken somewhere above Kennedy Town to the composite buildings and Shangri-La Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui – to migrant slums that were being dismantled as public housing improved. Hong Kong has continually changed from an architectural point of view, though the pace has slowed recently. Some of the shots pulled at me deep inside as only a home you deeply cared about can.

An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty featured Alex Man as a classic wuxi swordsman. The star is Pat Ha Man-jing who would have been 18 or 19 at the time. The film feels more ‘Japanese’ chambara romance than your usual Hong Kong film. Ha’s cleavage is on display – which is unusual as the Hong Kong film industry is more socially conservative. Violence is ok, but risqué films like Sex and Zen with a category III rating often had Japanese actresses in them like Mari Ayukawa and Rena Murakami. The Japanese actresses appeared because of the stigma in Hong Kong society affected actresses careers more than their male counterparts AND the ongoing popularity of Japanese adult films in Hong Kong.

An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty shows the two sides of Shaw Brothers productions: great actors and inventive cinematography on one side, together with cheap skating on set design like giant marine plywood panels.

Shaw Brothers had been wounded by the founding of Golden Harvest, he power of the studio system was waning, the Hong Kong new wave movement was taking off and soon ‘mainland collaborations’ would dismantle much of the ecosystem that made Hong Kong cinema great.

I really wanted to like Butterfly on Amazon Prime Video. It had a great cast including Daniel Dae Kim, Piper Perabo and Charles Parnell. It was shot on location in South Korea. It had an interesting take on the privatisation of intelligence operations. But it felt empty and definitely less than the sum of its parts, which is a shame given how well Amazon did on its Tom Clancy adaptions. Butterfly was let down by poor storytelling.

Useful tools.

Yet another LLM. Anara was something I have trialled a little and found useful due to its heavier weighting towards citing research papers compared to the other main LLMs out there. Useful for account planners as another tool in our arsenal to be used in parallel with the more mainstream tools out there, rather than as a substitute.

The sales pitch.

I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my August 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward for an indian summer, despite some of August already feeling autumnal.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

Get in touch if you have any tips or thoughts.
August 28, 2025
June 2025
June 2025 introduction – thee and me (23) edition

Welcome to my June 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 23rd issue or as 23 would be called in bingo halls ‘thee and me’.

Basketball legend Michael Jordan wore the number 23 on his jersey when he played for the Chicago Bulls and when he returned to basketball to play for the Washington Wizards.

At the beginning of the 20th century, 23 and 23Skidoo appeared memetically as short hand for ‘to leave’ or to be asked to leave in American English. There are no satisfactory explanations about its origin.

It went on to be referenced in American plays, a Popeye cartoon, a William Burroughs story and inspire the name of a post-punk band founded by original international Stüssy Tribe member ‘Alex Baby‘.

Burroughs inspired the ’23 enigma’ which appeared in new age and alternative literature including The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

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.
- Walsh’s of Mullingar and more things dwelt on multi-generational businesses in Ireland, memetic ideas in architecture and the political act of hacking.
- Augmented retailing – how machine learning is being used beyond efficiency to actually help customers in a customer-centric approach to customer experience.
- Living with the Casio GW-9500 Mudman watch. Or, why I am wearing an old school G-Shock when smartwatches can do so much more?
Books that I have read.
- I finished Rogue Agent by Andy McDermott. It’s an easy undemanding read, ideal for a holiday. It benefits from good pacing of the plot line and feels like it’s aimed at a British working-class male reader. It feels like it would be a good Amazon Prime or Netflix series if adapted from the novel.
Things I have been inspired by.

Walk the house

Walk the house is an exhibition at the Tate Modern by a Korean artist Do Ho Suh. The exhibition features a number of works that challenge what we think about living spaces and their sense of permanence. There is a traditional Korean house reproduced in charcoal rubbed fine paper, which captures every detail of the building’s exterior.

There is a tension between the scale and ephemeral nature of the work. The traditional Korean house also contrasted with modern apartment replicas in polyester mesh curtain material and wire supports.

The material and the extreme fidelity to detail that the artist brings gives them a dream-like quality like reliving a memory.

The exhibition is on at the Tate Modern until October and I can’t recommend it enough.

Time for some new ‘Age Thinking’

There was a moment in 2023 when the IPA Census of the UK advertising industry saw no one reach retirement age in any advertising agency. Anna Sampson was tasked with writing a report about age, systemic barriers and ageism with in the industry.

This directly impacts concerns around inclusivity, diversity and representation. It’s adversely affecting the work done for clients.

I remember listening to a creative director’s challenge in getting a production company to cast old people for a film. The production company was suggesting 40 year-olds, when what required was 70-plus.

I can also recommend Matthew Knight’s interview with Anna Sampson after the publication of the report.

What’s working in raising brand awareness?

WARC published their report What’s working in raising brand awareness, which is instant click bait to strategists. The findings in the report reinforce what we already knew from The Long and the Short of it and Ehrensberg-Bass’ How Brands Grow. It cites Research by Fospha found that brands who allocated at least 5% of their budgets to awareness and consideration saw a 22% higher return on advertising spend. When higher-awareness brands boosted their spend by 10%, they saw a 13% increase in sales.

AI’s dot com moment?

Given Mary Meeker‘s heritage in the late 1990s dot com bubble as evangelist rather than analyst – I was instinctively a bit leery of the hockey stick-shaped graphs in her new presentation on AI. The report gives good context to where many of the exponential claims. Like telecoms and the web before it, the presentation is an expression of confidence in progress, not a business model endorsement per se. Look instead at the financial results of major players in quarterly and annual filings.

Chart of the month.

Global podcast advertising growth seems to have matured based on data from WARC.

Things I have watched.

Bad Day At Blackrock – the film merges film noir with the western. It has a cast dominated by award-winning actors including Spencer Tracy as one-armed veteran with judo skills. Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin play local yahoos who try and needle a new arrival. The quality of the cast, the setting in the California high desert, a ramshackle western town and the Southern Pacific streamliner train – create an amazing film. Just ten years after the end of the second world war, Bad Day at Blackrock deals with racism against Asians. In my mind, it is John Sturges best film, but always overshadowed by his later works Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape.

I first saw Le Doulos (aka The Fingerman) in an arthouse cinema in Liverpool with some art student friends. It was great to watch it again, this time in Blu-Ray. Jean-Pierre Melville directed a classic piece of French New Wave cinema noir. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Silien, a complicated character whose true place in the story isn’t revealed until the final third of the movie. Belmondo’s role lights up the screen displaying movie star looks and the hardness of a gangster. The plot is carefully doled out like a well-played poker hand with enough twists and turns that kept me on the end of my seat. It’s a masterclass in storytelling.

Useful tools.

Pocket is shutting down

Pocket was a service that was integrated into Firefox by the Mozilla Foundation that allowed the user to bookmark a web a page that was used to save articles and webpages for later. if you’re a Pocket user and looking for an alternative I can recommend Pinboard. I have been using Pinboard for the best part of 15 years, so can vouch for the service.

The sales pitch.

I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency.

I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; 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 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into summer.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

Get in touch
June 26, 2025
May 2025 newsletter
May 2025 introduction – two little ducks (22) edition

Welcome to my May 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 22nd issue. 22 is known in bingo halls and the Spanish national lottery as two little ducks.

In France, 22 is the equivalent of 5-0 in the English speaking world as slang for the police. 22 is an important number for people who believe in numerology. In Hong Kong, 22 is associated with good fortune. This is down to the number sounding similar to ‘easy’ or ‘bright’ in Cantonese.

I hope that you are tricked into thinking I am bright based this newsletter, so let’s jump in. Inspired by catching up with my old DJing partner Griff, this month I enjoyed the unashamedly joyous pumped-up sounds of Blackpool’s AZYR at the Boiler Room x TeleTech Festival in 2023. In particular the transition at the end of the set between Frankyeffe – Save me and Infectious! – I need your lovin’. (Extra trainspotter points if you knew that Infectious! is a homage / remake of N.R.G’s The Real Hardcore from a year earlier). Wear your headphones, it might be divisive playing the set out loud in the office. More bangers from AZYR here.

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.
- Predicting market share through share of search volume and what the rise of AI likely means.
- Reaching a precipice in hydrogen power and trends in Chinese skincare amongst other things.
Books that I have read.
- Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams. Williams account of her time in Facebook had become the most discussed book of the spring in my social circle. I wrote a long review of it here.
- The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge examines the profound cultural impact of generative AI, which is currently experiencing a surge in both its cultural influence and practical applications. Drawing parallels to the internet’s transformative impact in the mid-to-late 1990s, where it permeated various aspects of society and fostered rapid adoption, Wooldridge traces the evolution of generative AI as a phenomenon that emerged gradually over the past half-century. Throughout the book, Wooldridge provides a comprehensive historical overview of AI, including the periods of research stagnation known as AI winters. This historical perspective equips readers with a nuanced understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of AI, enabling them to approach AI adoption with a well-informed perspective.
- As I finish this newsletter during the bank holiday weekend, my light reading is Rogue Asset by Andy McDermott. McDermott comes from a long line of British authors like Jack Higgins, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth and Mick Herron who provide novels aimed at a shrinking pool of readers – men. At least, if one is to believe what’s said in the media. Rogue Asset hinges on the premise that the UK has a unit which assassinates the countries enemies on a regular basis. Think somewhere between The Troubles era Det and the modern deep state trope. Our hero is snared into the plot by being discovered on the run thanks to his online behaviour – which is attributed to GCHQ; (but isn’t as mysterious as it sounds because of the programmatic advertising technology stack). So far so good for what it is. I will let know if it goes downhill as a read next month.
Things I have been inspired by.

Mmrytok

Limitations are often the mother of invention. That seems to be the theory behind mmrytok. Mmrytok allows you to do one post a day. It doesn’t support HTML formatting, it doesn’t allow you to link out and doesn’t have a newsfeed. So it’s easy-to-use because it’s less sophisticated than Geocities was. In this respect it is to social media and blogs what Punkt is to smartphones. In an always-on social time, I have found it liberating to use. You can see my page here. I heard of Mmrytok thanks to Matt Muir’s great newsletter Web Curios.

No, AI isn’t making you dumber

Australian documentary maker ColdFusion put together an interesting video essay on How AI is making you dumber.

Yes, you could argue that under certain attributes the population isn’t as smart as they have been in the past. Just last month I shared an article by John Burn-Murdoch. In the article he shared data of a longitudinal trend across countries and age-groups struggling with concentration, declining verbal and numerical reasoning. The problem with Burn-Murdoch’s article vis-a-vis the ColdFusion video is the timeline.

His article charts a decline further back than the rise of generative AI services. Mia Levitin in an essay for the FT attributed the decline in reading to the quick dopamine hits of social media content.

A college professor interviewed by The Atlantic put the decline in reading amongst his undergraduate students put it down to a practice in secondary education of atomising content. Pupils in high schools were assigned excerpts, poetry and news articles to read, but not complete books. This has impacted the size of vocabulary and grasp of language that students starting university now have.

This isn’t new territory, James Gleick in his book Faster documented the massive acceleration of information through the late 20th century and its effects on the general public. The underlying accelerant was described by Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants as the technium – a continuous forward progress due to a massively interconnected system of technology.

There were concerns in research as far back as the late 1980s that television could be adversely affecting children’s reading comprehension and attention spans.

TL;DR – with generative AI you could become dumber, if you use it unwisely – but the problem lies with all of us and what we chose to do with our personal agency.

CIA advertise for Chinese spies

The CIA commissioned a couple of high production value adverts that they’ve been running on social media channels. The adverts are designed to encourage Chinese government employees to come forward as an agent. The sales pitch is about taking control.

A translation of the Chinese tagline: ‘The reason for choosing cooperation: to become the master of (one’s own) destiny‘. More details from the FT about the campaign here, and here’s the two executions currently running on YouTube.

It remains to be seen if the campaign will be effective. The Chinese Ministry of State Security managed to roll-up the CIA’s spy network back in 2010-2012. Up to 30 informants in China were executed.

Montirex

Merseyside sports-inspired lifestyle brand Montirex have published a film telling the brand story from its origins to the present day. The brand is expanding beyond its Merseyside roots to get national and international sales.

Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence

A 2025 global study covering some 48 countries was conducted by KPMG in association with the University of Melbourne. Some key insights from the report. Consumer generative AI is being used instead of enterprise options by workers. Generative AI adopters still have self-perceived low AI skills but that doesn’t slow their adoption. There is higher adoption and trust rates in emerging markets than in developed markets.

Year-on-year we are seeing an increase in both distrust and trust for specific AI use cases, indicating that it is becoming a polarising subject. The lowest trust levels is in tech-savvy Finland. More here.

Chart of the month.

McDonald’s Restaurants saw a decline in sales. This was down to low income consumers spending less, while middle class earners still weren’t going into McDonalds. Normally when there is a recession, McDonalds should benefit from the more well-off trading down to McDonalds. Instead, fortunes have diverged into a ‘k-shaped’ recession. Lower income earners are hit, while middle classes aren’t. What Axios called the ‘McRecession‘.

Things I have watched.

Tony Arzenta (also known as Big Guns). The film is an early 1970s gallo film. French star Alain Delon appears in this classic retribution story based in Milan. As Tony Arzenta, Delon exacts revenge on the former bosses who killed his family by accident in a botched assassination attempt to prevent him from retiring.The film uses a wintry Milan as a good atmospheric backdrop for the action that plays out in a series of shoot-outs and car chases. It’s John Wick before it was even conceived. Delon brings a tension that other stars of the era like Charles Bronson failed to do in similar roles. As Arzenta’s targets flee across Europe, he goes through Germany and Denmark to catch up with them.

Sansho the Bailiff – as a film Sansho the Bailiff comes encumbered with a weight of praise. It is highly rated by film critics and Martin Scorsese had it as one of his must-watch films for young film makers. Director Kenji Mizoguchi assembled an ensemble cast of Japanese actors to tell a story of family hardship and poverty. Kazuo Miyagawa is key to the the production, providing a signature look to the cinematography. There is a tension between the emotional rollercoaster of the story and the reflective nature of the scenes portrayed – I don’t want to say too more, except that even the character actors like Kikue Môri (who plays a pivotal role in the plot as a priestess) are amazing in the film.

Warfare – I was a bit leery of watching Alex Garland’s Warfare after watching Civil War which was strong on aesthetics and emotion, but weak in terms of the creative conceits involved in making the story work. Warfare is the collective accounts of a US military unit during a two-hour fire fight. The story is told from multiple perspectives in real-time. The film captures the stress and boredom of inaction as well as what you would normally expect from this kind of film.

Useful tools.

Reddit Answers

Reddit Answers – alternative to Gigabrain that I recommended back in March. Like Gigabrain, Reddit Answers looks like the kind of knowledge search product that we failed to build at Yahoo! twenty years ago (or NORA as Microsoft has been calling the concept for the past few years). Reddit Answers is powered by Google Vertex AI.

Process online data like its peak web 2.0 all over again

While WordPress installations come with RSS enabled as standard and is something that can then be disabled, many types of sites aren’t RSS enabled. And where they are the web devs will often disable it just because. RSS app will create an RSS feed for websites that don’t have it. This allows you to pull it into data processing using something like Pipes. RSS app starts at $9.99 per month and goes up to $99.99 a month. Pipes starts at free and goes up to $79 per month.

The sales pitch.

I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency.

I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements in Q4 (October) – keep me in mind; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my May 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and I hope you enjoyed the last bank holiday until August.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.
May 26, 2025