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.

January 2026 newsletter
January 2026 introduction – (30) the dirty Gertie edition

I am now at issue 30, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘dirty gertie’. This phrase was the nickname given in the 1920s to a statue called by La Délivrance by French sculptor Émile Guillaume.

The statue was created to celebrate the German army having being stopped before Paris in World War 1. It was originally called La Victoire – there is a matching statue in Nantes, France.

1960s student activists claimed that you shouldn’t trust anyone over the age of 30, making a virtue of ageism. While activists were deeply suspicious, 30 in Cantonese is considered to be lucky as the number three sounds like alive or life.

It might be winter outside, but it doesn’t need to be winter in your head thanks to Graeme Park’s Best of 2025 part 1 which is two and a half hours of goodness. Now we have a sound track, 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.

Each year, I try and write an account of year as it happens. It provides a perspective on what appeared important at the time rather than in retrospect. Here’s the one I did for 2025.

The Dot LLM Era came out of my thinking about the massive expenditure in building infrastructure and the computing power needed by AI services like OpenAI and Anthropic, asking how it will be paid for and what it means for for business, consumers, investors and technologies.

There was so much happening from childhood beauty product usage alarming dermatologists to corporate and national moves in AI sovereignty. So I captured some of the most interesting of them here.

Books that I have read.

Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything. Mazzucato’s work was reflected in the Labour Party’s economic manifesto during the 2024 general election. The book does a good job of diagnosing the current challenges that the UK economy faces at the present time. More on the book here.

How to Write a Good Advertisement: a short course in copywriting by Victor O. Schwab. During the CoVID lockdown, I picked up several books on my craft. This was one of them. Schwab wrote this book in 1962, when his audience would have been predominantly writing advertising copy for campaigns run predominantly in newspapers – but all of the principles in the book remain solid. More on the book here.

Things I have been inspired by.

Every time I get a brief that defines an audience as a generation my heart sinks a bit for several reasons. Which is why I was glad to read this Ipsos View Point and share it as widely as possible. Generational Marketing: Breaking free from stereotypes provides research on the nuances missed by a generational approach, how we differ by age cohort and life stage, alongside what brings us together as common challenges.

While it won’t get as much ink as Christmas or Super Bowl adverts the CIA kicked off January with another video aimed at recruiting Chinese agents. They advised them to use a VPN and Tor browser to get in touch with them online.

Chart of the month.

After I came back to London after working on various brands including Colgate in Asia, I noticed that all the Colgate adverts followed a standard formula. It puzzled me: the ads were distinctive by their ‘undistinctiveness’. They had no emotion and a limited number of brand cues beyond name checks and a pack shot or two.

If like me, you’ve ever wondered why Colgate toothpaste adverts (in Europe at least) always seem to be based around a dentist or dental nurse (who may, or may not be a generative AI) character, then Ipsos Veracity Index 2025, may have the answer.

The Ipsos Veracity Index, is a great piece of longitudinal research launched in 1983. It does an annual poll studying change in public trust towards leading professions in Britain. Much of the headlines for this year was the low trust position scored by influencers, with just 6% of people generally trusting them to tell the truth.

I think that number has a number of problems with it, to do with the phrase general which would invite them to think about creators they don’t follow at least as much as those that they do follow. Secondly, not all influencer types are supposed to be trusted be it being videos on e-gaming play, humour and general ‘banter’ or shock jock-type content.

As Ipsos themselves noted, there was a tension between the declared trust level with the amount of news consumption that now happens on social channels from influencers.

Getting back to the Colgate question, the answer is at the top of the table. Healthcare professionals and technical experts are at the most trusted professions in the UK.

Things I have watched.

The TV schedule was terrible over the Christmas period and there were only so many reruns of Jessie Stone that even my Dad can sit through. So I entertained him with a mix of streamed films, old VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond directed by Hélène Cattet and impressed the hell out of me. At its heart it’s a mystery full of illusion, delusion and deception. It oscillates between two timelines one from the late sixties on and the second as an elderly version of the protagonist in the present day. In his day, the protagonist had been a Francophone James Bond-type figure, but darker like Fleming’s novels rather than the version that we see on screen. There are also hints of modern French historical figures like Alfred Sirven and Jean-Claude Veillard. The film has a lot of French new wave motifs particularly at its beginning. I was reminded of Alain Delon’sTraitement de choc , Diabolik and the André Hunebelle directed OSS 117 series of films in the mid-1960s.

Bubblegum Crash – no that isn’t a typo. Bubblegum Crash was a follow on from the Bubblegum Crisis manga and OVA (original video animation – made for direct to video distribution without being broadcast or shown in a cinema first) anime series. I had these on VHS tape at my parent’s house and it was fantastic revisiting them decades later. Bubblegum Crash is less serious and the artwork isn’t as good as the original series, but it’s still great cyberpunk fiction.

It felt surprisingly fresh, wealth inequality, get rich schemes, large corporations behaving badly, an openly gay police officer, autonomous machines from robots to cars and normalised smartphone usage.

All this from an animated series that was produced in 1991, at this time robots were stuck in car plants, AI was image stabilisation in the latest high-end camcorders and handheld mobile phones were over 20cm long in use. Cellphones were only starting to become less than a kilogram in weight with the launch of Motorola’s MicroTAC in 1989.

Detective vs Sleuths – a Johnnie To-adjacent film that a friend in Hong Kong gifted to me. The film was directed by Wai Ka-fai who collaborated with To and co-founded production company Milkyway Image together. Detective vs Sleuths feels thematically and stylistically similar to Mad Detective which Wai co-directed with To in 2007. That similarity brought me back to happier days flying on Cathay Pacific, sipping Hong Kong-style milk tea and watching Mad Detective soon after it had came out for the first time on the airplane entertainment system.

Without spoiling the plot, old cold cases are having new light shone on them by a series of deaths. Sean Lau plays a Nietzsche-quoting former detective with his own sanity in question.

Production-wise, the film was shot in 2018, was in post-production until 2019 and finally released after the worst of CoVID was over in 2022. If you are a passionate Hong Kong film watcher, then you will notice the similarities with Mad Detective; but Detective vs Sleuths still holds up as a really enjoyable inventive film with a number of surprises for the audience.

Useful tools.

Kinopio – quick lightweight service similar to Miro and MilanNote.

Clean Links – for iPhone, iPad and Mac cleans out tracking codes from URLs when you share them, for instance in a Slack conversation.

Not a tool per se, but a technique that started on Chromium browsers and is now more widely supported, scroll to text fragments. Appending to the end of a URL:

#:~:text=startWord,endWord

When someone clicks on the link they are guided directly to a highlighted section on the page, rather than having to search or guess at what you meant. It isn’t perfect, but it’s rather good.

Capacities – an interesting knowledge management and research app similar to Notion, Mendeley, Yojimbo or DEVONThink.

The sales pitch.

i am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.

With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. Most recently, I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI.

My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.

The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a “wholehearted” strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my January 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and good luck with your new year’s resolutions. As an additional treat here is a link to my charts of the month for 2025, in PowerPoint format that you can freely use in your own presentations.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.
January 28, 2026
How to Write a Good Advertisement by Victor O. Schwab

Victor O. Schwab’s How to Write a Good Advertisement was originally written in 1962, there was no internet and television was emergent in terms of being an advertising format that copywriters would be working on. I bought it as part of several books during CoVID and am slowly working through my reading pile now.

Schwab looked to write a straight forward guide for copywriters of the time. Schwab focuses heavily on the psychology of advertising to elicit the right kind of reaction from the consumer.

This psychology is something that modern marketers have had to relearn through marketing science. Yet Schwab was quoting academics, rigorous market research surveys and psychology studies 50 years earlier.

Schwab’s style throughout the book is to show examples that work and why they work. Despite Schwab teaching copywriters about media that would be seen as largely irrelevant now, the lessons are still invaluable.

Each chapter is clearly set out and has questions at the end of the chapter is that the reader can reflect on what they’ve learned and apply their thinking. There is also an exercise or two so that you can apply what you’ve learned from the chapter.

Performance marketing

The mail order copywriting section in How to Write a Good Advertisement is particularly interesting because of its focus on what we’d now call performance marketing. Schwab talks about performance marketing copywriters having to become hard nosed in nature. By hard nosed, Schwab described a mindset as a single-minded focus on the sale.

This section also covered testing in a way that would feel very familiar to online advertising practitioners now.

Conclusion

While Schwab doesn’t give you models, frameworks or mnemonics to aid retention or learning of principles, relying instead on trying to build muscle memory of the student copywriter.

You can find out more about How to Write a Good Advertisement here.

You can find more book reviews here.

January 11, 2026
The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy

The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy is written by Italian-American academic Mariana Mazzucato.

Background

Mazzucato’s work focuses on the intersection of innovation, economics and the role of government. Currently she is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL).

For an economics book The Value of Everything is surprisingly accessible to read. I managed to get through it’s 180 pages in just over a day.

Starting with a quick tour of economic history over five centuries, Mazzucato dissects what value actually means, its connection to statehood and how that meaning has evolved over time.

Premise

The central premise of Mazzucato’s argument is that there are problems the way market economies currently work. Those problems come from the imbalance between value creation and value extraction. The book argues that it is far too easy for those operating in the market economy to get rich by extracting value from those who actually create it, rather than by adding it themselves.

The book diagnoses the reasons for this challenge, notably how value is defined by economists, business people, governments, investors and politicians. Along the way, it touches on what Will Hutton’s The State We’re In termed ‘short-termism’. Mazzucato’s argument isn’t a new one and covers areas that have been talked about in the UK economy since the 1960s by the likes of economist Nicholas Kaldor. If you’ve watched the work of BBC documentary film maker, Adam Curtis the subject matter will feel very familiar.

Mazzucato also addresses the value imbalances in technology platforms echoing the work of Columbia law professor Tim Wu’s work from The Master Switch in 2010 to The Age of Extraction published last year.

In at the top

What makes Mazzucato different to the likes of Gary Stevenson is that the current government is at least paying lip service to her ideas, notably the idea of a mission led government. Whether or not the government can turn Mazzucato’s ideas in The Value of Everything into actionable policy and deliver on it is a discussion way beyond this book review.

Read more book reviews here.

January 5, 2026
December 2025 issue 29
December 2025 introduction – (29) rise and shine edition

I am now at issue 29, in Chinese numerology the number 29 is viewed positively, as it symbolises a long-lasting harmonious relationship. In bingo slang 29 is referred to as ‘rise-and-shine’ – ironic given that we’re currently enjoying the least daylight in any part of the year.

If you’ve managed to avoid Whamageddon – well done. I did my part with last month’s recommendation for Christmas music.

This time you can’t do much better capturing pure joy than Folamour at the Mixmag Lab in London. Now we have a sound track, 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.

A quick look at the implications of the US government’s new National Security Strategy.

Rob Belk featured me in the Rambull newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed to his newsletter yet, I recommend doing so. It’s akin to a modern-day version of The Whole Earth Catalog, filled with carefully curated tools and useful resources, but without the tie-dye elephant pants. You can check it out here.

Books that I have read.
- Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen. I bought several books on the recommendation of friends during the COVD lockdown and am slowly whittling my way through the pile, Counterinsurgency was one of them. It’s a collection of writings by Australian academic David Kilcullen, who advised the US government from 2005 – 2006 about Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is a collection of his writings from articles in military journals repeating many of the lessons learned in the past about fighting against guerrillas to Indonesian history. I had done some campaigns in Indonesia in the past for Qualcomm and Indofoods, so was interested in the post-independence history within it at the time. More about the book here.
Things I have been inspired by.

Due to the timing on writing the last newsletter, I missed writing about how I got to spend an evening with senior in-house marketers thanks to The Ortus Club. The evening was held at a restaurant in Mayfair sharing experience of AI in terms of its benefits, future opportunities and challenges.

Discussion themes that resonated:
- There isn’t a lack of enthusiasm for generative AI in the corporate world.
- Generative AI work often isn’t checked, to the detriment of it. It’s a powerful assist but you need to trust but verify.
- IP concerns are holding back adoption and impacting tool choice by enterprises. Legal / regulatory departments are important AI gatekeepers.
- Picking the right AI tool for the right job, too many organisations are trying to use one AI tool for everything.
Toyota officially unveiled their GR GT and it’s gorgeous looking. It is also a strikingly different direction to the likes of Mercedes Benz and the Volkswagen Group of companies with only useful technology allowed. its rather different to the usual automotive approach of a computer that happens to have four wheels.

In what is fast becoming an annual end of year tradition, Iolanda Carvalho, Amy Daroukakis, Gonzalo Gregori and Ci En Lee compiled 135+ trend reports from various organisations and strategists tucked straight in. You can explore most of them using NotebookLM here.

Chart of the month.

Ipsos have been doing research in conjunction with Joe.co.uk looking at all things masculinity. One of the charts that stood out for me asked about the use of dating apps.

There was a clear gender gap between app usage numbers which represented an interesting challenge for product managers. It would merit further investigation as to the why. I have a couple of hypotheses:
- Your product didn’t engage with women as much as men.
- Your product is a poor medium to build up a rapport.
- Some sort of difference in on-app behaviour usage that divides genders.
- Your product carries social baggage that means women are less likely to admit that they have used your service.
You can see how dating app brands have tried to address this through in real life events and women move first in-app mechanisms.

Things I have watched.

I managed to get hold of Bullet In The Head on Blu Ray. While John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow. The Killer and Hard Boiled are respected by western directors, Bullet In The Head doesn’t get enough appreciation. The story of the film is almost as good as the film itself. Woo split with production partner Tsui Hark to direct his own script. Woo even self-financed the film. The film is Woo’s singular vision with influences including the Tiananmen Square student protests, Vietnam news reel footage and The Deer Hunter. Over time it had become hard to find and is under-appreciated. It’s not a perfect film because it was so ambitious in terms of its scale and there is a softness to the cinematography that you also see The Killer. Despite all that, it’s a fantastic film that I would thoroughly recommend. As a bonus, here’s a list of John Woo’s favourite films, as you can see he has impeccable taste.

Prison on Fire is part of my on-again, off-again tour through Ringo Lam’s filmography. Made in 1987, it has ‘Big Tony’ Leung Ka-fai who plays a graphic designer working in an ad agency who is sent to prison for manslaughter. He and his prison friend played by Chow Yun-fat navigate sadistic guards and violent triad convicts.

Prison on Fire 2 was Ringo Lam’s sequel to the first successful instalment of Prison on Fire. Chow Yun-fat returned to play his central role in the sequel, this time dealing with mainland prisoners, in addition to the usual triads and sadistic guards. In addition to the action, the film focuses much more on the relationship between Chow and his on-screen son. Given the various hot button issues in the film from a modern-day Hong Kong context:
- Triad – prison guard collusion
- Conflict between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese
- Blackening the name of the disciplined services* of the Hong Kong government (coastguard, police, corrections department, anti-corruption agency etc.)
You are unlikely to see the like of the Prison on Fire films again, they would be in contravention of NatSec aka Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Thief was Michael Mann’s film debut. A hard-bitten heist film with film noir vibes. James Caan plays the protagonist Frank, a professional safe cracker adept at drilling locks out or cutting the door open with a thermic lance. He partners with James Belushi who plays an alarm expert. Mann contrasts the professionalism of Frank executing heists with his awkwardness claiming the heart of his girlfriend. A lot of the tension and craft he later brought to Heat and Collateral are already on display in this first firm, for instance the way Mann shoots nighttime scenes and paces the film’s plot. Tangerine Dream give Thief an amazing soundtrack.

Useful tools.

I have been working on a number of video projects and we’ve been using Trint to allow a perfect transcript to be made from digital video rushes that would aid in the editing and post-production process.

Whether you prospecting for adtech or job-hunting; Mediasense’s agency family tree makes life easier.

If you are moving into a leadership position, Zoe Arden‘s Story-Centred Leadership: Crafting Cultures of Change is probably worth a look. The book looks at how leaders can use stories to drive change through an iterative process of ‘listening, building, shaping, sharing and living’ their stories, rather than treating the story as a one-and-done activation. That might sound a bit new-age and your mileage may vary in terms of how it works as a tool for your leadership style. But Zoe might be on to something. Nick Chater‘s The Mind is Flat looked at neuroscience and what we know about thinking arrived at the conclusion that stories are software for the brain and Story-Centred Leadership seems to come from a similar direction. (Disclosure: Zoe worked at my first agency, back then I worked at on B2B & consumer technology and telecoms clients.)

The sales pitch.

I have been 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 December 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and have a great Christmas and new year. Keep an eye out for my retrospective rundown of 2025.

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

Get in touch if you have any recommendations, and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.
December 22, 2025
Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen
Counterinsurgency was one of several books that seemed interesting and that I bought during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 which I am slowly working my way through.

David Kilcullen

David Kilcullen is a former Australian military officer, who is an academic working at University of New South Wales, Canberra. Back in 2005 he advised the US government for a year while it dealt with insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has since been advising various companies about aspects of international studies.

Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency is a collection of his writings for military and academic journals. It covers everything from a tactical guide to officers dealing with local communities to the history of Indonesia post-independence and its efforts to combat East Timorese looking to become independent.

Kilcullen’s Counterinsurgency interesting to read for several reasons:
- Accessible writing: he writes really well making his subject areas very accessible to enquiring minds. For an academic, it was refreshingly jargon-free and articulated complex situations simply.
- His how-to guides for US military officers serving in Afghanistan gave me an insight that I previously didn’t have from the media coverage.
- As someone who had worked on Indonesian market campaigns for Indofoods and Qualcomm, knowing more about this complex country was rewarding. Kilcullen provides an accessible window into two points in the post-independence history of Indonesia.
One of the key things that I took away from Counterinsurgency was the fragility of knowledge in organisations. Much of the work that Kilcullen is doing in the first part of the book was instilling hard-won knowledge that the world’s militaries had learned from TE Lawrence tormenting the Great Arab Revolt onwards including Vietnam, various American cold war campaigns, the British in Malaya and Northern Ireland.

Militaries put a lot of effort into capturing the history of conflicts and spend a lot of time on lessons learned. This is far more effort than organisations generally put into place to learn from the likes of marketing campaigns, yet Kilcullen’s writing was valuable because that knowledge seemed to be slipping through the cracks of militaries.

If you have an enquiring mind about world affairs and history, I can recommend Counterinsurgency as a good read. Other book reviews can be found here.
December 21, 2025