Ye

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

Japan's Sumitomo will pump £7.5bn into British clean energy by 2035, including offshore wind and hydrogen projects.

The deal will "create high-value jobs" and "boost economic growth right across the UK," according to our Investment Minister.

Fingers crossed.

ADVERTISING
Britain’s biggest advertising empire is dying

Shares in WPP fell 13% on Wednesday, another sigh from this British ad company on its deathbed, its value having declined from £24 billion to £5 billion in just 8 years. And it’s (mostly) because:

The world of Don Draper is gone

When ad agencies could rely on a few fat accounts with multinationals to pay the bills and monopolise the marketplace.  

2025 sounded the death knell: this year was the first time when creator content surpassed traditional advertising streams. 

TV usage is down. Mobile usage is up. Clients want to monitor customer behaviour and target them with AI-generated, personalised ads. However:

WPP was late to the party

Unlike its arch-nemesis Publicis, which invested in AI before it became a cool topic for middle-class dinner parties. 

Naturally, WPP has lost some big accounts in recent years. Paramount. Coca-Cola. And Mars, which cost them an unholy £1.2 billion. 

They all jumped ship

And came aboard Publicis, the daring Parisian tech pirate to WPP’s semi-retired English country gentleman. 

Since 2019, Publicis has been acquiring consumer intelligence platforms, databases with billions of user profiles, and AI infrastructure. Through all of these unbelievably cunning, strategic acquisitions, the company can now target customers with eerily accurate personalised ads.

As opposed to just taking a jolly punt based on instinct, like:

WPP in the Dark Ages

God, it was only in 2024 that WPP decided that it might be a good idea to invest in AI - £300 million yearly. 

In that time, the company has laid off nearly half of its staff, seen stocks plummet, and high-value clients leave. 

Only time will tell whether it can save its dying empire from the scrapheap of history.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Chief executives are disappointed with AI

According to a survey of 2,000 company leaders by the Swiss consultancy firm, Akkodis, which found chief executives were 11% less confident in their company’s AI rollout since last year. 

CEOs are particularly bitter

Their confidence has fallen from 82% to 49%. 

Chief technology officers, meanwhile, reported a 20% drop in confidence. And those nerds know what they’re talking about. 

Only chief human resource officers reported feeling happier. Need I say more?

This shouldn’t be surprising

Companies are starting to sober up after getting drunk on all the AI hype from last year, with many companies now re-hiring humans after claiming they were easily replaceable. 

Just look at Klarna. 

After replacing 700 employees with AI agents in 2024, (and boasting about being Sam Altman’s “favourite guinea pig”), Klarna’s CEO started hiring humans again in May this year. 

We’re witnessing a bubble waiting to burst. 

HOSPITALITY
One pub closes a day in Britain

That’s an increase from last year, when 350 pubs closed. The British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) blame business rates because: 

Pubs are often in old buildings

The traditional British pub, that is. 

Business rates are evaluated based on how much it would theoretically cost to rent a particular premise. 

And the older the building, the more expensive by market value. So ye olde English pub is disproportionately affected. 

Then there are sin taxes

Pubs sell beer (which is sinful), so the government lumps them with ridiculously high VAT and beer duty. 

Britain has the second-highest beer duty in Europe, by the way. 

Which means one pound in every four goes straight to the Treasury, the absolute parasites. 

It’s an unholy cocktail

When you consider that pubs - once the social backbone of Britain - have been lumped with increased NI contributions and minimum wages, along with energy bills double of what they were in 2022. 

S.O.P. Save Our Pubs. 

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• 🤖 🔍️ OpenAI is releasing a web browser in the next few weeks. It will let AI Agents carry out tasks for users: filling out forms and booking things, for example. And users won’t have to click through to websites. Many of ChatGPT’s 500 million active weekly users will inevitably use the browser, putting a dent in Google’s ad revenue, three-quarters of which comes from Chrome. 

• 🏛️ 🏢 An ancient Roman building was found beneath an office block construction site in London. Plans to build the office block in the City of London were revised. Now the office block will feature a public exhibition on the 2,000-year-old government building. So more people will be thinking about the Roman Empire. Which is good. 

• 👮 🧑‍💻 Google doesn’t penalise AI content, according to Ahrefs, which studied 600,000 web pages. But it’s complicated. The study also found that the more heavily AI-written a piece of content is, the less likely it is to be a top-ranking page. 28% of top-ranking pages were very reliant on AI, while 54% were not. Basically, using AI won’t hurt your content, but using it too much will. 

• ✈️ 🤑 People are booking flights closer to departure, according to Jet2. Compared with last summer, the airline has 8% more available seats. Across the travel industry, last-minute bookings are increasing year on year, with 27% of travel bookings made within 7 days of departure, a 4% increase from last year.

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🏦 The Bank of England slashed mortgage rules, letting banks give out more high loan-to-income (LTI) mortgages - loans more than 4.5 times a person’s annual salary. Bank nerds reckon this’ll help an extra 35,000 first-time buyers. This news comes after Rachel Reeves announced (after some public weeping) that the government will pay 95% of a person’s mortgage if they default on their loan, a great way to deal with sky-high government debt. 

• 🤔 🤝 Our government has made a weird deal with Google, with the tech giant agreeing to upskill tens of thousands of civil servants in exchange for… Absolutely nothing. But when you consider that all of our government’s data may very well be stored on American servers, you sort of get the gist.