Blog

Mooncakes + more things
Mooncakes

Mooncakes were a big part of my time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. This year, mid-September marked mid-autumn festival across Asia or known as Chuseok in Korea. It is similar to harvest festivals that happen elsewhere in the world.

It is celebrated in Chinese communities with mooncakes. Mooncakes traditionally have been made of fat filled pastry cases and lids filled with red bean or lotus seed paste and a salted dried egg yolk.

Mooncakes are moulded and have auspicious messages or symbols embossed on the top, like the double happiness ideogram which also appears on new year decorations and at weddings.

In the past mooncakes have been used to make political statements in Hong Kong where they were embossed with messages against the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019. This mirrored mooncake history, where concealed messages were alleged to have been used to ferment rebellion against Mongolian rule in China centuries ago.

China saw a halving of mooncakes sold this year, compared to last year. This is a mix of fast-moving events like the state of consumer spending and longer term factors including gifting culture and attitudes to health and fitness.

The economy

The consumer economy seems to be doing worse than industrial output. Youth unemployment is still an issue.

Gifting culture

China saw a crackdown on premium priced mooncakes as part of a government move against ‘excessive consumption‘ driven by societal excess and ‘money worship’. This overall movement has dampened luxury sales. The Chinese government stopped officials buying mooncakes a decade ago as part of a crackdown on corruption.

Some consumers just aren’t into them

They were as divisive as Christmas cake is in Irish and British households. Brands like Haagen-Daz and Starbucks have looked to reinvent mooncakes into something more palatable.

Health and fitness

Health and fitness has been steadily growing as a trend in China. A number of reasons have been at play including changing beauty standards. Chinese women are still going to favour slimness over muscle, but home workouts and running have been increasing in popularity. The fitness industry has been growing and the Chinese government has also tried to foster interest in winter sports. So there would be a good reason to avoid ruining all the hard work that you put in by eating mooncakes.

Business

Nike CEO John Donahoe to Step Down | BoF

Economics

Why Do Workers Dislike Inflation? Wage Erosion and Conflict Costs* by Joao Guerreiro, Jonathon Hazell, Chen Lian and Christina Patterson – workers must take costly actions (“conflict”) to have nominal wages catch up with inflation, meaning there are welfare costs even if real wages do not fall as inflation rises. We study a menu-cost style model, where workers choose whether to engage in conflict with employers to secure a wage increase. We show that, following a rise in inflation, wage catchup resulting from more frequent conflict does not raise welfare. Instead, the impact of inflation on worker welfare is determined by what we term “wage erosion”—how inflation would lower real wages if workers’ conflict decisions did not respond to inflation. As a result, measuring welfare using observed wage growth understates the costs of inflation. We conduct a survey showing that workers are willing to sacrifice 1.75% of their wages to avoid conflict. Calibrating the model to the survey data, the aggregate costs of inflation incorporating conflict more than double the costs of inflation via falling real wages alone

FMCG

Unilever ends up as a punching bag for Greenpeace and having their purpose blown up. As a campaign idea, the public celebration by the Dove brand team of the 20th anniversary of Dove’s real beauty positioning and creative left themselves open to this. Greenpeace used a skilful reframing in this creative.

The reason why the developing world seems to be disproportionately affected by plastic waste highlighted is for a number of reasons:
- A lot of and paper and plastic recycling is shipped abroad. It used to go to China, but they declined to accept waste to recycle from 2018 onwards. So this waste went to other markets.
- Developing markets have single portion packaging so that FMCG companies can distribute via neighbourhood shops and sell the product for the price a consumer can afford.
- Plastic is easier to colour, manufacture, package and transport than glass, metal or coated paper. Biodegradable or effective post-use supply chains are well behind where they should be. And even if you were open to recycling, there may be brand issues.
Innovation

Chinese scientists claim they can use Starlink satellites to detect stealth aircraft | BGR

Japan

AI will help Sony expand Japanese anime’s growing fan base | FT – but would also help competitors out-produce Sony. Expect a Chinese anime avalanche.

Marketing

Campbell’s drops the ‘soup’: what the evidence says about adapting brand fundamentals | WARC

Media

OpenAI Messed With the Wrong Mega-Popular Parenting Forum | WIRED

Retail media frenzy muddies negotiations with brands, who agency execs say must spend or ‘suffer the consequences’ – Digiday and Retail media networks put the squeeze on brands | WARC – Spending on RMNs could be seen as part of normal partnership agreements between brands and retailers that have traditionally included marketing commitments. That shades into a grey area if retailers become focused primarily on growing their ad business, but those same retailers can’t expect brands to spend more unless they can demonstrate results. At the same time, brands have their wider media mix to consider.

In context
- The pairing of advertisers with consumers close to the point of purchase via rich, first-party data is leading to better ROI relative to other channels for some advertisers and is cited as a key driver of increasing retail media investment.
- Retail media is growing in double digits every year; it currently accounts for around 14% of global ad spend and is projected to account for 22.7% of online advertising by 2026.
- Retail media is no longer a ‘medium’ in the conventional sense but is instead evolving into an infrastructure underpinning the entire digital advertising ecosystem.
Content Creators in the Adult Industry Want a Say in AI Rules | WIRED

Security

JLR’s letter: what Land Rover’s doing to stop your older car getting nicked | CAR Magazine – update on JLR’s security crisis

Software

A brief history of QuickTime – The Eclectic Light Company

Technology

NTT Data builds a mainframe cloud for Banks • The Register – mainframes are still amazing for large scale batch processing
September 25, 2024
Not the target demographic
My parents are not the target demographic for most brands. Like me they don’t see themselves represented on screen. Even the old guy from the Werther’s Original advert doesn’t appear any more.

Spending some time with them recently allowed me to see what brands might be missing out on and how they related to brands.

Why are they not the target demographic?

Let’s do a thought experiment. If we asked marketers about why my parents aren’t the target demographic. There would likely be a range of answers and I am guessing that these would be prominent amongst them:
- They aren’t aspirational
- They aren’t culturally relevant
- We’re after lifetime spend, that means below 35
- We don’t understand them
- We can’t reach them
- They’ll have set behaviours
They aren’t aspirational

Neither are most brands, despite what marketers might want to think. Your supermarket is full of functional brands, as are utilities like electricity, gas suppliers, water board, broadband and mobile operators. You don’t virtue signal your status through being on Plusnet, but you might do through your iPhone. Funnily enough the accessibility features, simplicity of design and ease of my providing technical support means that they run an Apple household. They do want their house to look nice, be clean and are thinking about replacing their car. They’d like to go out and see things and maybe even do a bit of travel.

One fact from the Pew Research Centre surprised me, but spoke directly to aspiration. Retirement age people are twice as likely than the working population to be entrepreneurs working in self-employment. BBH interviewed 20 retirement age people in Britain and found that they strived for significance.

They aren’t culturally relevant

Neither is the advertising industry a lot of the time, despite attempts to diversify it is still overwhelmingly southern and middle class. If you go up north commercial dance music radio so unds very different from what you would hear in London.

Even clothing brands signalling are different. At the moment in Liverpool, locally designed apparel brand Montirex is more common than Gym Shark, Nike or Under Armour. Is this difference reflected in what we see from ad agencies? Often not.

The advertising industry isn’t culturally relevant for a lot of young people let alone older people who would be considered to be not the target demographic. Finally, ZAK pointed out in their work Learn to Time Travel that culture is cross-generational. And we can think of lots of tastemakers who are older: streetwear OGs like Alex Turnbull, Marc Fraser, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Nigo, John Landis or Michael Kopelman. Slightly younger designers like Yoon Ahn, who is in her late 40s, are barely hitting their stride.

We’re after lifetime spend, that means below 35

Most western countries are aging. In the UK’s case the average age of the population is 43. People are living longer, but also wealth / power to spend moving in favour of older people and has been for a good while.

We don’t understand them

As an industry we have little, if any understanding of older people. We don’t work with older people according to the IPA agency census. No one retired in advertising last year, only 7% of our industry are 50 or over. The average age of our industry is 34.6 years old, compared to the UK average of 43.

In the US, the Pew Research Centre, alongside the likes of Ofcom in the UK have published some basic research to get things started.

BBH London have tried to start learning more about older consumers with their Silver Culture Project.

And just like youth culture demanded attention 70 years ago, this too deserves to be seen, heard and celebrated.

One in five people in the UK is over 65.
In less than 20 years that will be one in four.*

The over 65s hold over half of the UK’s wealth, with the average 65+ household having a net worth of £500k-£1 million.

We can’t reach them

I was reminded of a LinkedIn post by Steve Walls where he talked about how little of the adverts celebrated by the ad industry he actually saw when he wasn’t on LinkedIn. It’s a sentiment I could relate to. Stepping away from LinkedIn and watching evening television with my parents, I ended up watching more FMCG-related advertising than I had seen during my usual more online-based life.

I particularly liked the way Flash had doubled down and repeated the same creative for the past four years or so.

My Dad got a bit excited showing me the Twix bears. They were short listed for Cannes in 2022 and as an advert it just works regardless of age. My Dad beamed as he talked along with the bears word-for-word. Kit Kats have been displaced in his shopping trolley by Twix.

The Twix bears

My Dad also likes the Vitality dachshund and the Compare The Market meerkats. While its reassuring seeing that fluent objects, humour and creativity work for all generations, it also implies that despite him being not the target demographic media planners still seem to be doing a better job reaching my Dad compared to myself (or Steve Walls.)

There are some less memorable ads out there such Colgate Total’s dentist endorsement.

They’ll have set behaviours

This fails to recognise two things. Older people do change behaviour over time if it makes sense. You can see this is higher than expected level of technology adaptation by older generations. For instance, they are still using cashless payments, despite a lifetime of cash and cheque books.

They are technology users, including smartphones, but less of them are using social media (and that might not be a bad thing). More retirement age people are working than ever before, the number in the US has doubled in a decade.

In my parents case, behavioural change came partly due to COVID, they embraced Amazon to buy cleaning products, supplements, motor oil and vacuum cleaner spare parts.

Secondly, behaviour change is often forced upon them from medically induced changes such as giving up smoking. Then you have physical changes from less range of movement, hearing or vision to incontinence.

Some brands have tapped into this market.

Always Discreet

Procter & Gamble have extended their Always menstrual pad brand to cover incontinence due to aging. Discreet are underpants with a built in pad allowing users to continue having a normal life. Procter & Gamble has managed to move from ‘not the target demographic’ to new product innovation and brand extensions.

You can find more related posts here.
September 15, 2024
AI search + more things

AI search

This section on AI search is largely down to Rowan Kisby’s observations over at LinkedIn. I worked with Rowan when I was her client at Unilever, super-smart, can’t recommend her enough. Now on to AI search: Google has looked to augment its web search in a more obvious way with generative AI providing ‘AI search’ features.

The AI search features have adversely affected publishers of non-time dependant evergreen content according to Authoritas. This has sparked concern amongst media publishers, but early feedback on IAC and Ziff-Davis shareholder calls indicated little change in traffic numbers. Google claims that AI search feature ‘AI previews’ actually delivers more, rather than less click throughs.

China

IBM Shuts China R&D Operations in Latest Retreat by U.S. Companies – WSJ – Microsoft has made a similar retreat

Culture

Dr Mike Lynch OBE | Obituary – Sound on Sound magazine cover’s Lynch’s music hardware career which happened before he started Autonomy. The bit that this story misses is how Lynch’s developments helped move forward digital music and affecting electronica during a particularly creative point in culture including house and the rave scene that spun out of it.

I can’t recommend Phoebe Yu‘s content enough, this video on colour, culture and user experience design is a great example of her work.

Why everyone is obsessed with toys right now – The Face – The Face finally catches up with nerd life.

Economics

The changing role of the US dollar | Brookings Institute

Why Can’t the U.S. Build Ships? – by Brian Potter

Hong Kong

Hong Kong like Japan has people with a real passion for buses and trains, and unlike the UK, both countries cater to their ‘trainspotters’.

Wong Kar Wai’s Guide to Hong Kong: Arts Intel Report – Arts Intel

Ideas

Section have a series of templates for looking at AI use in business, more here.

Luxury

How ‘luxury shame’ will shape sales in China for the rest of 2024 | Vogue Business – wealthy people and corrupt government officials don’t want to be seen to be rocking the boat from a societal perspective lest they get caught in the view of the authorities or Chinese netizens. This is especially true given the slow economy and Xi administration focus on ‘common prosperity‘ to reign in wealthier business leaders. Burberry as a brand relying on China is particularly affected, which has reduced its stature: Burberry drops out of FTSE 100 | Drapers Online

The Geopolitics of Wine | Peter Zeihan – thanks to increasing costs of capital, aging worker demographics and climate change New Zealand and Australia will do better than Latin American wines and most European offerings except France

The Collectability of Parmigiani Fleurier | Phillips

Marketing

Colgate-Palmolive’s financial performance proves that over-indexing on share-of-voice through shopper marketing and advertising delivers positive financial results: Colgate-Palmolive: ‘The advertising is working’ | WARC | The Feed

Is marketing entering its ‘era of less’? | WARC | The Feed – based on Gartner CMO surveys marketers are increasingly being seen as cost centres and are being asked to do more with less which is affecting mar tech spend, staffing and agency spend.

Materials

The first tensor processor chip based on carbon nanotubes could lead to energy-efficient AI processing | Techxplore

IKEA preowned | IKEA – Ikea tried to get into the circular economy

Media

Here’s the Pitch Deck for ‘Active Listening’ Ad Targeting | 404 Media

Right-Wing Influencer Network Tenet Media Allegedly Spread Russian Disinformation | WIRED

Online

Rise of the ‘chefluencers’: Can China cook up its own Nara Smith? | Jing Daily

Farewell, Microblog – China Media Project

Retailing

How to connect offline to China’s Gen Z and Alpha? | Jing Daily – Young Chinese consumers are finding new consumer interests away from blind boxes and claw machines: ‘Guzi’ (谷子) stores. ‘Guzi’, derived from the phonetic English ‘Goods’, describes merchandise featuring popular ACG (animation, comics, and games) characters, including badges, standees, and posters. – China develops it’s take on otaku culture

Security

Chinese vendor jailed for giving railway data to foreigners: State Security Ministry | South China Morning Post

Interesting interview with Anthony Blinken on cybersecurity. See also: Chinese government hackers penetrate U.S. internet providers to spy – The Washington Post

Current CIA director Bill Burns and Richard Moore, his counterpart at SIS appeared at the FT Weekend festival in London.

Technology

White House publishes roadmap to secure internet routing • The Register

September 11, 2024
Southport + more things

Southport

At the time, when the stabbing of three little girls happened in Southport, I was in Merseyside. Even though I was just miles away from the town, it felt like another country. The locals I was with and I watched on with detached shock as riots unfolded on newsfeeds.

The general sense was that ‘it couldn’t happen here’ But it had. This was usually followed by ‘despite what people see, this isn’t the kind of people that we are’. Yet Merseyside has long had a well-deserved reputation for organised (and disorganised) crime. Apart from a pier and a sea view that on a clear day allowed you to see oil rigs on the horizon, Southport is very similar to most of Merseyside. Rumours had swirled on neighbourhood WhatsApp groups about the attackers background. Secondly the vast amount of rioters being prosecuted, were not neo-nazis from out of town but local trouble-makers whose guiding idea was the joy of the fight. The police were able to arrest many of them as easily identifiable known faces. Pair the trouble-makers with good weather and an inciting incident and chaos ensued. There is continued latent anger for various reasons just waiting for an excuse to break out and the Southport stabbings were a vehicle.

The thin membrane of civility was punctured. The chaotic nihilism on display mirrored the 2011 riots, with less opportunity for profitable looting. Southport is ‘everyneighbourhood’. It represents an underlying volatility in UK society that is deeper than the hundreds of rioters on Merseyside. There is probably more Southport in many people than we would care to admit.

Consumer behaviour

The People Who Quit Dating – The Atlantic

Energy

Implications of the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment | FTI

How one South Korean garage fire could affect the EV market | FT – transparency in battery sourcing and real truths on strategic resilience.

Finance

Meaningless board games at HKEX, and how the UK FCA has just made an awful mistake – comments on LSE are particularly interesting

FMCG

The Katsuification of Britain – Vittles

Middle East turns to non-alcoholic beers, healthier than colas and not tainted by Gaza war | South China Morning Post – Alcohol-free beer sales grow in the Middle East, for health reasons and because, amid Gaza war, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are seen as pro-Israel

Gadgets

Chromecast is Dead. Long Live the 12th Attempt at a Streaming Box.

Logitech’s ‘forever’ mouse isn’t happening – The Verge

Hong Kong

US Firms Warn Against ‘Unprecedented’ Hong Kong Cyber Rules – Bloomberg – technology firms have warned that proposed cyber regulations could grant the Hong Kong government unusual access to their computer systems, highlighting the latest challenge to Western tech giants in the city. The Asia Internet Coalition, which includes Amazon, Google and Meta is among the bodies that have in recent weeks criticized new rules that officials say are designed to protect critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. Critics argue the proposals give authorities overly broad powers that could threaten the integrity of service providers and rock confidence in the city’s digital economy.

Ideas

Wired | Encyclopedia of the New Economy – probably one of the most influential things that I read during the first internet boom

Innovation

AI creates acoustic metamaterials | EE Times Europe – interesting work at Pusan University to reduce noise pollution

London

No. This is NOT just “far right thuggery” – Matt Goodwin

Luxury

Macau’s tourism transformation: Luxury brands left behind? | Jing Daily

Auction houses aim to lure Asia’s ultra-rich with new openings | FT – this had been happening since before 2019. A more cynical observer might point out how useful auction houses are to faciliate capital flight from the mainland.

Marketing

WFA discontinues GARM – World Federation of Advertisers

Attribution is Dying. Clicks are Dying. Marketing is Going Back to the 20th Century. – SparkToro

All Airlines Are Now the Same – The Atlantic – a lack of distinctiveness in US airline offerings

Steven Bartlett Huel and Zoe adverts banned by ASA – BBC News

Most brands fail becaue they never do this – The Strat Labs

The Future of the GE Brand – STRONGBRANDSSTRONGBRANDS

Google threatened tech influencers unless they ‘preferred’ the Pixel | The Verge – that’s some straight up vintage Microsoft tactics right there.

Media

Prime Video Ads Have Yet to Pay Off | The Information

Brands Love Influencers (Until Politics Get Involved) – The New York Times – With the presidential election looming, some marketing agencies have started to pitch advertisers on new tools that grade the so-called brand safety of social media personalities. Some of the tools even use artificial intelligence to predict the likelihood that a particular influencer will discuss politics in the future.
A tool recently introduced by Captiv8, a marketing firm that helps advertisers like Walmart and Kraft Heinz connect with influencers, uses artificial intelligence to analyze mentions of social media stars in online articles, and then determines whether they are likely to discuss elections or “political hot topics.” The firm also assigns letter grades to creators based on their posts, comments and media coverage, where an “A” means very safe and a “C” signals caution. The grades incorporate categories like “sensitive social issues,” death and war, hate speech or explicit content.

The Race Is On to Build The Next Profitable Streaming Service – Bloomberg

Online

Misleading TikTok alerts include false Taylor Swift claim and old tsunami warning | FT

X Sees Decline In Users And Most Of Them Are From Europe | Digital Information World

Palantir CEO: Trump’s Rise Is Tied to the ‘Excesses of Silicon Valley’ – Business Insider

Retailing

Pitney Bowes sells its global e-commerce segment – Parcel and Postal Technology International

7-Eleven owner receives Japan’s biggest ever foreign takeover approach | FT – huge for Asian grocery retailing. 7-Eleven is the neighbourhood grocery store for Japanese and many other countries across Asia. In Japan, 7-Eleven is the dominant brand, combining it with Circle K would radically change the marketing dynamics. In a market like Hong Kong it’s effectively a duopoly with Circle K. The approach is likely more about 7-Eleven’s US filling station network. Expect the Asian business to be sold on (to private equity) if the deal goes through.

Security

Almost unfixable “Sinkclose” bug affects hundreds of millions of AMD chips | Ars Technica

Intel failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering • The Register – interesting analysis of Intel Semiconductor at the moment

Royal Mail launches new ‘fake stamp scanner’ | Money Saving Expert

Germany blames China for ‘serious’ cyber attack

Software

Change blindness – by Ethan Mollick – One Useful Thing – the change in LLM performance over the past two years

Digital Equivalent of Inbreeding Could Cause AI to Collapse on Itself : ScienceAlert more on this here.

Style

Ambition doesn’t need permission* – by Brian Morrissey – Nike’s multitude of business issues

Web-of-no-web

Immersive Technologies and the Metaverse: Recommendations and Overview – BBC R&D

Amazon to acquire Perceive for $80M from Xperi, expanding its AI technology for edge devices – GeekWire

China will launch first satellites of constellation to rival Starlink, newspaper reports | Reuters – A Chinese state-owned enterprise (Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology) is launching the first batch of satellites for a megaconstellation designed to rival Starlink’s near-global internet network, a state-backed newspaper reported on Monday.It matches Beijing’s strategic goal of creating its own version of Starlink, a growing commercial broadband constellation that has about 5,500 satellites in space and is used by consumers, companies and government agencies.

August 30, 2024
August 2024 newsletter – unlucky 13?
August 2024 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my August 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 13th issue. When I lived in Hong Kong; four was the unluckiest number. 13 featured in confucian beliefs and in tai chi. In western culture 13 has a similar reputation. The status of 13 goes all the way back to Babylonian times. A baker’s dozen contained 13 items; rather than the usual 12 items.

This time last year, I had a daft idea to put together stuff I’ve written, read, been inspired by or have watched that I thought some people might find of interest. Along the way, I shared my Ma’s recipe for a traditional Irish Hallowe’en dish, book recommendations, articles, a review of 2023 and much more.

Salem State University Archives August 18, 1987 “Boston Medical Flight helicopter using new helipad”

I spent a good deal of August outside London to recharge and take care of family business. I am now back and getting ready for September.

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.
- My cousin selling the ‘ancestral’ family farm back in Ireland, got me thinking about roots.
- I explored Rob Henderson’s concept of ‘luxury beliefs‘ and other things that I found of interest from around the web.
- I looked at some of the themes that have emerged around generative AI in the first half of this year.
Books that I have read.
- The Ribbon Queen – I am a huge fan of Garth Ennis as a graphic novel writer and the publication of The Ribbon Queen was the second best news I had received this year since Ennis announced his return to The Punisher series at the beginning of 2024. With The Ribbon Queen Ennis returns obliquely to religion with a tale that sits somewhere between a police procedural and Lovecroftian fiction. Nothing is simple with Ennis and the work touches on themes like police brutality, woke culture, sex trafficking, domestic violence and ancient beliefs.
- Part of my love reading comes from my Dad’s library of crime and espionage books. I started reading John LeCarré, Hammond Innes and Alistair Maclean in primary school. Secondary school had me reading Gerald Seymour and Robert Ludlum. Seymour’s work felt more grounded and Harry’s Game during The Troubles felt especially pertinent. Despite being 82 years old Seymour still writes. I haven’t picked up a Seymour novel in decades until I got to read In For The Kill. its the third book in a franchise of Jonas Merrick – a soon-to-retire spook with a love of caravanning and frugality. As a holiday read, I really enjoyed it.
- Richard Stark’s Parker is an anti-hero beloved of Hollywood who has appeared in film over years. Richard Stark’s Parker: The Complete Collection is a collection of graphic novel adaptions of The Score, The Outfit, The Score, and Slayground, The Man with the Getaway Face and The Seventh. Stark’s Parker is written with crisp lean copy to match the no-nonsense dark ruthless character. He is at end of America’s hard boiled noir literature like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. But Richard Stark’s hero was an armed robber, not a detective. As a genre it was later revived by James Ellroy’s works from the late 1980s on. While Parker has been played on screen by a variety of actors including Lee Marvin and Mark Wahlberg – he is not a character for our times. Darwyn Cooke’s adaption of Parker to a graphic novel format is a 500+ page love letter to mid-century graphic design including vintage newspapers and petrol station maps. It’s a coffee table book that you actually want to read.
- Qiu Xiaolong is an American crime writer, who is famous for his character Chief Inspector Chen. In his book Becoming Inspector Chen, was recommended by my friend Ian. The book feels autobiographical in nature. Like Chen, Qiu had studies TS Elliot at university, both had lived through the opening up of China post-Cultural Revolution. Their paths divert when Qiu moved to study in the US and decided to stay there after the ‘June the 4th incident‘. Qiu describes the complex relationships in families due to the Cultural Revolution and the nature of change in China during its opening up phase. The book is an implicit critique of the current Xi administration, as yet again Chen faces the imminent impact of the party machine.
- Kara Swisher is a long-time journalist who chronicled Silicon Valley from the dot.com boom onward. In Burn Book Swisher gives us her potted history and hot takes on the people and companies that she tried to report on. I say tried because technology firms have made life difficult for journalists since blogging became a thing and they could go direct to the audience. Swisher came from an unhappy but privileged background and jumped into journalism with gusto. There isn’t anything that surprising in her reporting save how was it so late that Swisher really dialled into how toxic and nihilistic some of her subjects really were? Swisher’s book is more engaging than Fred Vogelstein’s Dogfight, but lacks the wit and panache of Michael Malone’s books or Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires.
A bit of aside to the books, I found this article by Dazed Digital quite interesting. Apparently, straight men are much less likely to read novels. I read a mix of fiction and non-fiction as you can probably tell if you are regular reader. If you want fiction recommendations as a start, I have some in an old post I wrote about 50 books I would recommend (scroll down to fiction).

Things I have been inspired by.

Quantum advertising.

Faris Yakob had dropped a banger of an opinion piece on WARC. In quantum advertising Yakob calls out marketing management for optimising to the wrong things and believing that creativity is predictable.

Aston Martin DB2

It also led me to Jeremy Bullmore’s ‘Aston Martin’ essay published by WPP as A 20th Century Lesson for 21st Century Brands.

Return-to-office mandates

Gartner the research house most famous for its technology reports has taken an in-depth look at return-to-office mandates beloved of large enterprises such as Apple, Amazon or Boeing and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Gartner looked at employee research and HR leaders as part of an up to date research done in May 2024. Any small gains in discretionary effort and employee engagement are wiped out by drops in intent to stay, with the implied disruption and cost cause by employee churn.

The findings are similar to what we saw with Slack Future Forum’s Inflexible return-to-office policies are hammering employee experience scores published in 2022.

New voices

Zoë Mann started an initiative that would get some of the newer strategist voices heard.

Things I have watched.

I haven’t watched A Clockwork Orange for a while and revisited it. I am still amazed by the way Kubrick used lighting, Beethoven and the Wendy Carlos soundtrack to such good effect. It also felt much more creative and transgressive than anything one would see at the cinema now. The modernist and brutalist architecture gives it an otherworldly quality now.

I wanted to watch Weathering With You since it came out. I finally got to watch it. The animation is almost as rich as Studio Ghibli and the plot has some fantastical elements of it as well. But the story is grounded in the darker side of Tokyo.

The protagonist is homeless and lives in a net café near the Kabukicho gate that marks the entry to the red light district that is part of Shinjuku ward. In this respect the anime provides a realistic portrayal of a ‘freeter’ – an under-employed young person.

Alain Delon died and I had a movie marathon with my Dad to celebrate his life: Un Flic, Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge.

Useful tools.

Whatfont

Whatfont is a Google Chrome browser plugin, Safari browser extension and bookmarklet (I use the bookmarklet) that tells you what font’s are on a given web page.

Google Analytics health check

Yes I know GA4 is hateful, but Fresh Egg have put together a template to make a data health check easier to do. Give them your details and download their GA 4 Health Check for free.

Decrapifying LinkedIn

At last a compelling use case for the Arc Browser: as a LinkedIn client. Luddite LinkedIn is a ‘boost’ (think plug-in) cleans out things like AI powered elements of the LinkedIn experience.

Better Reddit and YouTube search

GigaBrain provides an alternative to the broken experience searching on Reddit and YouTube. It’s available via webpage and a Google Chrome browser plugin.

The sales pitch.

I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements, I am available for much of September. Contact me here. I am also open to discussions on permanent roles.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

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

Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
August 27, 2024