Search results for: “influence”

Micro influencers
Micro influencers – much of the social marketing today for consumer brand is done through what is called influencer marketing. For a number of these influencers who have a large social following, working with brand has become very lucrative. But one of the hottest tickets at the moment within communications agencies are ‘micro-influencers’; Edelman Digital lists it as a key area in Digital Trends Report . There is widely cited research by Marketly that claims there is an engagement ceiling (at least on Instagram). Once a follower count gets beyond that, engagement rates decline. This micro-influencer sweet spot is apparently 1,000 – 100,000 followers.

What are micro influencers?

Brown & Fiorella (2013) described micro influencers

Adequately identifying prospective customers, and further segmenting them based on situations and situational factors enables us to identify the people and businesses – or technologies an channels that are closest to them in each scenario. We call these micro-influencers and see them as the business’s opportunity to exert true influence over the customer’s decision-making process as opposed to macro-influencers who simply broadcast to a wider, more general audience.

Brown & Fiorella wanted to focus on formal prospect detail capture and conversion. It sounds like an adjunct to integrating marketing automation from the likes of Hubspot and Marketo into a public relations campaign.

This approach is more likely to work in certain circumstances:
- Low barrier to conversion (e-tailing)
- Business-to-business marketing – for instance Quocirca did some interesting research back in 2006 that showed endorsements by a finance directors peers at other companies was likely to have a positive effect on a prospective supplier
Brown & Fiorella’s thinking tends to fall down, when you deploy their approach to:
- Consumer marketing
- Mature product sectors
- Mature brands
Brand preference and purchase is much more dependent on reach and repetition to build familiarity and being ‘top-of-mind’ as a product.

Most money in influence marketing is spent in the consumer space as B2B marketing tends to struggle with:
- Reach
- Volume of conversation interaction
(At least outside of the US).

Brown and Fiorella are 180 degrees away from the approach of consumer marketing maven Byron Sharp and his ‘smart’ mass marketing approach. This means that PR and social agencies are often out-of-step with the thinking of marketing clients, their media planners and other agency partners.

Engagement matters less than reach or repetition of brand message for mature sectors or brands. For many consumer brands the drop off in engagement amongst macro-influencers is a non-issue, a red herring.

The only part of the engagement measure that I would be concerned about in that case would be content propagation amongst my defined target audience – how widely had it been repeatedly shared as this would affect total reach.

If the client and planner are using Sharp’s thinking then this audience would be wide, but a certain amount of the propagation would be wasted – for instance outside targeted geographies.

From the perspective of communications agencies I can understand the obsession with engagement being part of their DNA. Micro influencers are an extension of this, as macro-influencers value is increasingly out of whack with their marketing benefits. These businesses are in the offline world are engagement agencies; whether its politicians, regulators, fashion stylists, movie set designers, editors, journalists, TV producers or DJs.

Why are micro influencers a hot topic now?

The most obvious reason is that more popular ‘macro-influencers’ are well informed about their commercial value which has been driven up to a point where they look expensive in terms of cost, even if you charitably look at it on a ‘per follower’ basis.

On the supply side of the equation, influencer representation benefit from having more ‘inventory’ that can be sold at various price points to marketers. So in some respects micro influencers fulfil a market supply need.

Challenges in influencer marketing

From a marketing perspective there are a number of issues in influencer marketing – these factors are either unknown data points or represent an issue with the brand experience
- Quality of brand placement
- Cost per reach
- Consistency of reach (how confident is the media planner that the influencer will achieve a certain level of reach)
- Message repetition amongst the audience that I want to reach
Which makes it harder to factor into an econometric model that would help justify the investment in influencer marketing as a contribution to sales.

Let’s have a look at data around a campaign for smartphone manufacturer Huawei. This has been touted as successful by the agency involved, Social Chain. We don’t know the cost as its likely to be client confidential.
- 2 million YouTube views (we don’t know how many of these were driven by advertising)
- 75,000 likes
- 13,587,159 impressions driven by 6 influencers
- 10,689 clicks from 90 posts
- 10 million impressions for the promotion of a colour variant of the smartphone model and 92,320 engaged
- 4.6% engagement rate (which we’re assured is 41% higher than the industry average for branded content)
What this doesn’t tell us:
- Reach amongst target audience
- Repetition amongst target audience
Which could then be used to provide an estimate of its contributory factor to sales if you had an econometrics model. You can’t access how it works next to other tactics and there are limited outtakes for the learning marketing organisation.

Quality of brand placement

Many brands have struggled to get their brand in the influencers content in a way that:
- Represents it in a meaningful way (for example beyond unboxing videos, one smartphone looks rather like another)
- Doesn’t feel ad-hoc or awkward
Some luxury brands have managed to get around this by keeping control of the content; a good example of this is De Grisogono – a family-run high jewellery and luxury watch brand. They work with fashion bloggers that meet their high standards and invite them to events. (It’s obviously an oversight on their part that I haven’t had an invite yet.)

De Grisogono provides them with high-quality photography of its pieces and the event. They get the best of both worlds: influencer marketing but with a high standard of brand presentation which raises the quality of the achieved reach.

There is a school of thought that micro influencers will be easier to manage in order to assure quality of brand placement. However, micro-influencers are likely to be aspiring macro-influencers and each will have a clear line of demarcation in their own head that they won’t cross. The reality is one of complexity dependent on:
- Brand power
- Relationships
- Credibility of proposed idea
- Impact on aspirations – could they get more followers by taking a stand and strategically burning a brand?
Cost per reach

Influencers tend to talk about themselves in terms of the number of followers that they have. However many followers seldom engage with the influencers content. This happens for a number of reasons:
- The follow button is often used as a book mark or a like button
- Algorithmic changes to social platforms and the volume of the social firehouse itself drown out brands (and these influencers are all about the brand of ‘me’). Whatley and Manson’s research at Ogilvy on the decline of organic reach in Facebook pages is worthwhile having a look at
Followers as a data point is not the straight analogue of reach that the industry and influencers would have you believe based on how they present their data.

Reach numbers that are presented are often not that much more useful:

(Data via Golin, TapInfluence and Marriott)

Consistency of reach

So influencers may give us follower numbers or ‘total reach’ calculations but how do we know what reach their brand placement content is likely to achieve? At the moment, I don’t know how consistent influencers are, I have a ‘personal time’ data project currently in progress on it. More on that hopefully in a later post. There isn’t off-the-peg data that I know of, so I am pulling together a data set.

Message repetition

Until we understand the ‘quality of brand placement’ we wouldn’t be able to understand whether a piece of influencer content was a point of content delivery. We’d also need to know do audiences of influencer A also look at media channels or other influencers that we have in our overall media plan. There often isn’t an overall media plan and there often isn’t sufficient quality of audience data for influencers.

More on influence here.

More information

Edelman Digital Trends Report – (PDF) makes some interesting reading
Instagram Marketing: Does Influencer Size Matter? | Markerly Blog
Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing by Danny Brown & Sam Fiorella ISBN-13: 978-0789751041 (2013)
Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach
January 16, 2017
Ten books that influenced my view of the world

I started thinking about what shaped me and came away with this list of ten books that influenced my view of the world. Even the nature of being able to read was a major mind opening experience. The world opened up from me from our neighbourhood and occasional visits to the family farm in Ireland. Starting off the ten books is a series, which is probably cheating but its my list.

Happy Venture reading system books with Dick and Dora. My first memory of reading was about a boy named Dick and a girl named Dora. They had a pet dog called Nip and a cat called Fluff. Part of the reason why these books appeared is that I related to Dick. Although I didn’t have a sister or a cat, I did share the house with a willful yellow Labrador that would get up to similar devilment to Nip. There was something of the haiku about the sentences in the book:

This is Dick.

Run, Dick, run.

Nip is a dog.

Nip, run to Dick.

What I didn’t know to much later is that the books were carefully crafted by a husband and wife team of Australian educationalists who had done a lot of research during the second world war on primary school learning. Fred and Eleanor Schonell’s books were the standard reading system for English pretty much everywhere outside the US. There are some who think that the US Dick and Jane books by Gray and Sharp plagarised the Happy Venture books. The Schonells also created the next stage you went on to reading the Wide Range Readers. If you want to blame anybody for this blog, Fred and Eleanor Schonell would be as good a people as any.

Ireland: a history by Robert Kee. Growing up at the end of the 1970s was a complicated time. The world was a more chaotic place than it is now (though I realise that maybe hard to believe). My Dad believed that I needed to have a good grasp of my own history and that would allow me to drive my own path. So he got me to read this dense academic history book that was originally written to accompany Ireland: a TV history – a co-production between RTÉ & the BBC. Kee was a British journalist who’d worked on Panorama with the series producer Jeremy Isaacs. Isaacs had produced The World At War in the early 1970s and my Dad had been a fan of the series because of its thoroughness and multifaceted viewpoint. To be honest with you I dreaded reading this book at the time because it was so big and there was so many words, but my Dad’s rationale stuck with me.

How It Works – Marshall Cavendish part works. My Dad used to read a lot whilst working shifts in the shipyard. He used to buy pulp paperbacks by the likes of Hammond Innes and Alistair McLean from a second-hand bookseller in Birkenhead market. One day he came home after being to the bookseller that lunch time. Instead of the usual couple of paperbacks was an open cardboard box under his arm and inside was a 50-volume part-work magazine published by Marshall Cavendish called How It Works. I used to dip in and out of it coming out of it with the answers to questions that I never knew I wanted to ask. The articles were generally better written and illustrated than the comparable Wikipedia article and there was a serendipity in randomly picking an issue and reading. Marshall Cavendish have re-released this at different times in different editions and with different numbers of volumes. I got rid of our box of How It Works magazines and instead managed to buy them as an encyclopedia set with much more robust bindings a few years later.

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. I remember being at primary school and hating having to pretend being Bilbo creeping around the dragon’s lair as some sort of half-assed drama class. I can still remember vividly the polished wooden floor feeling slippery beneath my socked feet. It was accompanied by the BBC dramatisation of the book which the school had a recording of. The recording inspired me to read Tolkien’s book despite the acting lesson trauma. The Hobbit acted as an on-ramp to the Lord Of The Rings series, I was fascinated by the intricate structure of it all: the multi-layered story that Tolkien created.

Modern Petroleum Technology – Institute of Petroleum. I had wanted to work in the oil industry for two main reasons: at the time I was living at the top of the Mersey basin which was dominated by oil refineries and chemical plants. Whilst environmentalists may see them as monstrosities in my child eyes they were a silver and fiery cathedral. The second influence was John Wayne’s portrayal of Red Adair in Hellfighters.

My Dad managed to borrow an old edition of Modern Petroleum Technology and I read through both volumes to help me prepare for a career in the oil industry. I eventually left the oil industry to study in marketing at university, but the experience that I gained put me in good stead for my subsequent roles.

The Art Of War – Sun Tzu. Despite having 13 chapters, The Art of War is a slim volume and an easy read. I dip into this book every so often and have done for the past 20 years. Everything else written on strategy is layered in unnecessary window dressing. I first picked up a copy of The Art of War while I was at university. There was a bookshop in the town which sold discounted textbooks way below price. I went in there looking for marketing books to broaden my source of references and came away with my first copy of this book and Accidental Empires.

Principles of Marketing – Philip Kotler. Doing my degree meant spending a lot of time with this book in a blue and grey Prentice Hall cover. Kotler’s work is thought to be the bible for marketers. To be honest with you, by the time I had finished my course I hated Kotler, his book sat on my shelf taunting me. It is the only book that I have burned. Reading Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow made me realise how much of marketing at the time was based on the opinions of old white academics rather than rigorous research.

Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely – I came across Accidental Empires in the library at university and it was a revelation. Mark Stephens aka Robert X. Cringely had lived and breathed Silicon Valley, working at employee number 12 at a very young Apple Computer; so he made the ideal guide to the technology industry. Unlike most books that provide a background in technology, Cringely wrote in an informal style and gave the warts and oil side to the story. The book gave me a really good primer on the technology sector which came in handy when I went to work in my first agency role for The Weber Group in their London office. Despite the fact that the book was last updated in 1997, it is still worthwhile getting a copy from your local book shop.

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig. I’d done and seen a lot by the time I got to college. One of the things I used to do was read a lot, especially whilst working a boring shift. I had an older friend called Mark who I had met through a summer job. He was well educated, but bummed out and used to smoke a lot of cannibis. The 9- 5 of repairing electric tools and concrete mixers gave him what we’d now call work life balance. He switched me on to ZATAOMM. On getting to college, during my final year there I spent a good deal of time sharing a house with a fellow ZATAOMM devotee. I still go back to this work and the follow-up Lila to reset my inner compass when life throws me a curve ball.

Ogilvy on Advertising – David Ogilvy. Everything that we do whether we realise it at the time or not builds on or is a derivative of the work of people who have gone before us. Reading Ogilvy on Advertising early in my agency career brought that home as I continually saw ideas redressed and polished for new audiences. For instance, some of the posts that I have written here to do with the ethics of social media mirror the same level of respect that Ogilvy had for the audience of his advertisement campaigns.

Those were my ten books, I hope to add to this list rather than remaining static. What ten books have influenced you? More book related content here.

Also check out my bookshelf of non-fiction recommendations here.

December 5, 2011
Influence singularity
This post on what I am calling influence singularity (and some other trends) came from discussions whilst travelling. I have been on the road a fair bit and have speaking to a number of people coming from all aspects of communications and marketing. Speaking to these different people has covered a lot of areas but three trends stood out:
- Influence singularity
- Welcome to your new press spokesperson, your customer care rep
- Inhouse vs. agency
I have explored these trends in a bit more depth below.

Influence singularity

Increasingly we are seeing agencies of all ilks: PR, advertising, marketing, digital and everything in between are descending on the area of influence – creating an influence singularity. This influence manifests itself primarily through social media and digital; though it can manifest itself in experiential events like un-conferences and meet-ups. One of the best campaigns I have come across was the RNLI’s efforts to engage with young people.

RNLI

A social media campaign thought through and brought to life by a direct marketing agency: they saw the interaction in a similar way to the relationship between an organisation and the recipient of a direct mail piece. Instead of a purchase call to action, they provided a task to be completed. It is not only at agencies where this conflict is happening, I hear anecdotally that marketers are having PR discussions both online and offline actvities and carving it up with no PR people involved.

The communications heads that were left out instead retreated to focus purely on corporate communications: outflanked, outgunned and out of their depth in a digital world. PR agencies where they have been involved, are often working with marketing managers as the inhouse PR people are not clued in.

A secondary aspect of this, is that where the role is reversed and the PR department has led on social media, they are now having their efforts hijacked by marketers playing catch-up – because the marketers feel that they should be the owner, have better budgets and often have the ear of the board.

This then begs the question: does PR the profession, its practitioners and the business need to have a rapid rebrand as a profession before it becomes roadkill?

Welcome to the new press spokesperson: your customer care rep

Back in 2004, I wrote a blog post about some comments that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had made about iPod owners having devices full of stolen music. I dashed off a missive to Microsoft.com’s customer service form and got a response.

At the time John Lettice, when writing about the affair in The Register said:

We’re sure iPod owners will regard being called law-abiding by an exec from a company with Microsoft’s legal experience as a high point to end the week on. But, you ask, how the blazes did we get to this one? We have Ged Carrol’s blog to thank. Mightily offended by Ballmer’s original comments, Ged used the feedback system at microsoft.com to demand an apology, and he got one. The possibility of feedback systems of this ilk actually working had never occurred to The Register, so we’ve never bothered trying, but if you want your very own grovel, insert your outraged howls here.

At that time, journalists didn’t think of customer care representatives as a source of comment. Six years later and with social media on tear, the customer care representative is increasingly on the frontline of reputation management.

Some of the discussions I have been involved with has been about the interface between PR and customer services. Where is the overlap? How do you ensure efficient and effective task management between the two? The last question is being addressed with solutions from the likes of Brandwatch and Salesforce.com.

Inhouse vs. agency

I was discussing in-house versus agency with some people recently and one of the key points they made was that whilst agencies provide flexibility in terms of manpower and access to tools that an in-house team couldn’t justify because of cost, social media’s need for immediate and decisive responsiveness required organisations to re-address their in-house requirements and expand their current capability. This is a great opportunity for measurement companies, other organisations that provide ‘horizontal’ services and e-lance digital communications people to interject as these considerations are being made. It may also cause some agencies to start thinking about what an agency means and how they can change the structure of their offering to ensure that they remain relevant.
June 21, 2010
September 2026 – the Christmas Cake edition
September 2026 introduction – (38)

Welcome to the 38th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘Christmas Cake’.

A less pleasant use of the term Christmas Cake was used in Japan during the boom times up to the 1990s..Mirroring China’s current use of ‘leftover women‘, Christmas Cake was used as a derogatory way of referring to a woman 25+ by comparing them to the cake which would lose its market attractiveness beyond (December) 25th.

Changing social norms has meant that this is largely a historical footnote in Japan.

38 in Chinese is largely considered positive as a number, based on its component numbers of 3 and 8. There are also 38 slots on an American roulette wheel, giving the house a 5.26% advantage. The wheels used in Macau and across European casinos have only 37 slots in them giving the house a 2.7% edge.

The cooler wetter weather was a welcome retreat from the heat waves we’ve been having. But summer still feels as if it lingered longer than it should. I spent the first two weeks still in shorts.

The soundtrack this month is a set by DJ / producer The Reflex at Defected Malta Glitterbox ’25. It’s as fabulous as it sounds, even when accompanied by a pumpkin spice latte if that’s your jam.

if you are baker read through to the end for some pro-tips from my Mam.

New reader?

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

Things that I’ve written

Strain wave gearing and more stuff. A round-up of interesting things from around the web. Strain wave gears are the main limitation and inciting technology for humanoid robots due to their unique properties.

Apple’s MacBook Pro at 20. I can’t believe that I have been using MacBook Pro’s for the best part of 20 years, so went back in time to reflect on how it changed laptop usage. Going back tells us a lot about the future of computing too.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Gucci’s ‘Drip’ sneaker and the death of regional savoir-faire attached to nation brands as a pillar in luxury’s heritage sell.
2. Why the hot takes on Kylian Mbappé’s move from Nike to On as his boot sponsor were wrong and what it really means at the moment.
3. WARC’s Multiplier Playbook and their attempt to bridge the brand building / brand activating divide for sustained growth and pricing margins.
4. How Boots the Chemist have been bringing together media and creative in a more integrated way to deliver better-performing performance creative.
5. Novo Nordisk as an example of what happens when your brand narrative falls out of your control.
Books that I have read

Horse Under Water by Len Deighton – I first read Horse Under Water at 11 or 12. My Dad had a lot of these pulp novels that he used to devour at work. Reading it all these years later highlighted the differences that have occurred since Deighton originally wrote the book in there early 1960s. But it was a quick enjoyable read of adventure and treachery, not that different to John Buchan‘s The Thirty-Nine Steps or The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service by Erskine Childers.

Susan Choi’s Flashlight fits uncomfortably between genres. It ties together the complex identity of Koreans in Japan, the North Korean kidnappings of Japanese residents, past secrets and the American expat experience at home and abroad. As the book unveils the story in a non-linear manner it explores loneliness, the failings of human memory and the nature of identity and belonging. It weighs on you.

Things I have been inspired by.

Snickers insight of ‘You’re Not You When You’re Hungry’ is a great ownable, yet universal truth. Take that insight together with the centrality that AI is taking in culture (mirroring the role of ‘the net’ in culture during the dot com boom) and you have a fantastic campaign, more over at LBBO. I really like the way they integrate GEO/AEO into their campaign execution.

Chart of the month.

I had been looking at an apparel project. It’s been a while since I have touched the sector and it was working with an agency on an aspirational clothing brand. Said brand were looking at a creative project related to the circular economy and the agency who had been exploring it gave me a budget to run a few quantitative questions in the last week of August. Here is the answers to one of the questions that we asked.

We got responses from over 750 people, it was a simple poll question where they had to pick one answer to “What is the most likely reason for you to keep something you don’t wear often”.

Things that surprised me in the responses:
- We didn’t have one response that indicated that they didn’t hoard anything and instead gifted their items or used the likes of Vinted or Depop. Implication: if you are Vinted or Depop, your customers are at best selling mediocre items. They are gatekeeping on the good stuff which offers challenges and commercial opportunities if it can be cracked.
- Durability kills circular economy velocity: ‘Quality’ and ‘preserving outfit options’ tied as the top reasons to hoard unworn garments. ‘It was expensive’ clocked a measly 8%. Quality and outfit options were the joint top reasons for keeping items despite them not being in circulation. Outfit optionality makes sense, but quality is an interesting space, particularly when ‘it was expensive’ ranked far lower at a mere 8 percent. Implications: There are implied perverse incentives to make things with lower quality at both the top end and bottom of the market – fast fashion and luxury brands. This has implications for the viability of the circular economy. It also begs the following hypothesis: it may not be price gouging in terms of value that is affecting luxury, but the inability to spend. The latter being a pretty damning comment on the current economic outlook.
Why I am able to share proprietary research

The project collapsed before kickoff because the client lacked both the internal sign-off and the actual budget. I ate a few upfront hours, the agency took the bigger hit, but I kept the research rights. Finding out early was the win.

If you need sharp strategic thinking, I have an unexpected project-shaped hole in my calendar heading into Q4.

Things I have watched.

August bank holiday, I revisited a few John Carpenter films. I started with Escape from New York. I started into it after speaking with a friend who suggested that it felt very now. The film reflected a deep distrust of the government, which one can see in the divisive nature of politics and Netflixation of political debate and the political process.

As a film it looks much more expensive than it was. Stylistically it influenced the colour on black aesthetic that I bring to my own slide ware and even this blog (once I had the skill to edit the WordPress theme), you can see it in my charts of the month. What I didn’t realise about the film when I first watched it years ago was why it was so different and why it resonated so strongly.

Carpenter wrote the script in 1974 – 1976 towards the end of the Vietnam war and through the Watergate scandal. The film was shot towards the end of the Carter administration while there were still American hostages held in Iran. Operation Eagle Claw had failed in April and this came out the following summer. Carpenter’s work always had a degree of social commentary in it, so the urban decay was a concern of New York in the 1970s and early 1980s. The film owes a debt to Sergio Leone’s films and features a raft of Hollywood greats including Leone star Lee van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine.

Looking back on it now it uses techiques that were only starting to come in at the time including low light shooting including long tracking shots. The science fiction conceit hides some of the great acting performances in the film. Ultimately it’s great fun to watch. One thing to look out for if you do watch it, look at how well Escape From New York does matte backgrounds compared to the poor work done on matte backgrounds in The Terminator shot a few years later by James Cameron.

The second John Carpenter film I watched was Prince of Darkness. I am not a horror film fan, so it took me far too long to to sit down and watch it. Prince of Darkness features a plethora of actors that had appeared in other Carpenter films previously appeared in Halloween and Escape From New York. Victor Wong had appeared in Big Trouble in Little China.

Secondly the film is actually a science fiction film dressed up as a classic horror film and Carpenter plays with nods towards the Quatermass science fiction films and George A. Romeo’s zombie trilogy. In some ways the film feels close to The Thing.

Useful tools.

I was recommended Claude Academy by Neil Perkin in his newsletter Only Dead Fish. I have focused squeezing the most juice out of my Google Gemini subscription but I trust Neil’s judgment on this.

Tidy is a cross-app service that uses an on-machine AI model to fix grammar and make your writing more concise.

AI Toolbox is a browser extension for Chrome users that gives you a view of your AI chats in one place making organising them into folders or saving them down in Markdown or PDF really easy.

Thoughts for Mac is an app that sits in the menu bar and allows you to capture ephemeral thoughts.

The sales pitch.

I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”. The kind where complexity, business goals, and human culture collide, requiring synthesis into actionable insights.

I have a decade-plus of expertise across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I have been embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots with the rapid rise of Gen AI. Following the completion of this engagement, I have continued to partner with agencies and founders on high-impact projects. My recent freelance work includes architecting the brand narrative for a fast-moving startup, driving strategic creative for new business pitches, and developing a dynamic sports partnership activation.

I focus on what actually works: balancing long-term brand growth with short-term sales. I do not just write presentation decks; I build campaigns that actually ship. Clients hire me to develop or perform strategic QA on their ideas before they go live, helping leadership teams avoid expensive mistakes. I prioritise commercial reality, smart budgets, and measurable results over cosmetic solutions.

How I help leadership teams:
- Strategy QA: I put clarity into complex roadmaps before you commit capital.
- Cultural Translation: I bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and human adoption, across EMEA/JAPAC.
- Commercial Grounding: I build strategy for campaigns that ship, prioritising measurable ROI over “hype” metrics.
The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Modular Strategic Leadership: 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 an operator who reads—using a deep archive of industry expertise to ensure your next pivot isn’t just “new,” but actually sustainable. If you have a challenge that requires an all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my September 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Enjoy autumn as it can often be fleeting.

Pro tips from my Mam: if you are making your own Christmas cake this year, steep your fruit this Friday, bake the cake on Saturday evening and leave to sit and mature in a tin. Be sure to skew the cake every few weeks and add a little Irish whiskey to drain in the top. The whiskey doesn’t need to be good, but you can’t go wrong with Power’s Gold Label.

And if you are making your own Christmas cake, why not make a barmbrack for Hallowe’en at the same time, here‘s my Mam’s recipe for the one we had each year at home as a child. Otherwise you are letting good heat go to waste in the oven.

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 my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
October 1, 2026
June 2026 newsletter, issue 35 the ‘jump-and-jive’ edition
June 2026 introduction – (35)

Welcome to the 35th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘jump-and-jive’. The phrase feels like an anachronism. It likely came from 1930s and 1940s African American culture. A portmanteau of ‘jump blues’ music and high-energy ‘jive’ dance style of the era. Jive was also used to describe related slang. All of which was popularised by the likes of Cab Calloway.

This month’s soundtrack is by Dimitri from Paris, recorded at Defected Records. It’s sublime.

While 35, is considered neutral in Chinese culture; there are aspects of it which bear thinking about. Depending how you read it, it can sound similar to ‘life without’ or ‘life not’. All of which seem appropriate when one thinks about the 35-Year-Old Crisis. Employers in China unofficially have 35 as a cut-off age for hiring.

New reader?

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

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. R/GA‘s concept of intelligent brand systems.
2. Brands can’t wait for sovereign cloud but have to work with what they have.
3. The argument over UPF (ultra processed food) is a blunt instrument that ignores the benefits of functional foods, focusing on how things are made, rather than nutrition and what they do.
4. The need for determination, taste and deciding what matters is as important as AI in advertising planning
5. Havas research on desirable brands revolving around attraction, attachment and affinity.
Books that I have read

Murder on Mt Fuji by Shizuko Natsuki is the story of the Wada family. A multi-generation family tied to a pharmaceutical business. The family patriarch Yohei Wada is killed and the story unravels the mystery of who really killed him and why. The Japanese title of the book references a play by a 1930s detective story author. The mystery plays out as an Agatha Christie novel with Japanese characteristics.

Things I have been inspired by.

AI transformation progress

Stanford HAI have built an online dashboard to track AI-related transformation through economics. At the moment there is still little evidence for a rapid wave of automation in the macroeconomic data, but its definitely worthwhile keeping an eye on for evidence-based analysis as an antidote to hype and speculation.

Chart of the month.

Going back over the IPA’s research into influencer campaign effectiveness, this chart buried in the report caused me to pause. It implies that there isn’t an effective formula for repeatable influencer marketing success.

Reading around the chart further, the data is artificially skewed by the removal of campaign data for which no RoI was received at all. That would lower the curve further than it is already.

Things I have watched.

I have been enjoying season two of The Agency, Paramount’s adaption the French series The Bureau about modern-day spies and the dangers of emotional attachment. I can highly recommend both of them. The Agency has a really strong cast with Michael Fassbender playing the protagonist, with Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere as supporting characters.

Seeing Richard Gere in the film reminded me to rewatch Red Corner which is a classic murder mystery from 1997, with the plot twist being that it occurs in the go-go era of an opening up China.

Bai Ling appears as his court-appointed lawyer. Parts of it reminded me of the late 1990s media gold rush into China by Rupert Murdoch looking to expand his then booming satellite TV business, but once the murder trial gets under way it stays into the land of fantasy with an American court room drama projected into a Chinese setting. Ling manages to turn out a great performance given the material that she was working with.

Useful tools.

I have been working on a number of qualitative interviews and found MumbleNote an invaluable part of the process. Its key benefit is not having bot join the calls that I have been doing. Instead it works of your Mac’s audio system.

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. 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. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives, creative platforms and new business pitches to sports partnerships.

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, Arm Holdings), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Personal Care, 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 all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of this newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the sun when you can.

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 my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
June 30, 2026

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