chaka chaka

so, oh mah gawd.

no way.

did’ya hear?

i’m going to london. for a creative brainstorm.  i’m going to london. flying business freaking class.

two equally desparite sources give two reasons for my good fortune:

i. i’m an all-rounder creative with both digital and above-the-line experience which will be invaluable to working out the kinks that come with creating a truly integrated (media neutral) campaign.

ii. someone else more worthy couldn’t go.

if i were the sort who cared, i’d tear my hair out with the anxiety of under-performing next to the shining brilliance of this First Choice, but bigger problems have reared their ugly heads:

how many cameras to bring? which cameras? what film? how many canisters? will i have time to meet my family? ARGH, shopping for winter clothing! uncle steve reported it’s now 0°C? you must be shitting me! do i stock up on thermal underwear? what if i have a brain freeze (hehe)? can i survive a week without JT?

oh, the tribulations of being a rockstar.

wheeeeee… have fun in your new office! miss you.

4 copywriters.
3 making a mad scrabble to clear leave before the year end.
1 poor sod who’s used up his quota (and then some).

as my dear butterfoot succinctly put it:

Jook u are my idol !! http://twitpic.com/qvsza

good luck, take care, all the best, my friend. you’ll need it.

work has been hectic. timelines have been totally fucked up. yet this week has been a nice one.

there was a dinner (after a long, torturous drive) at tamarind springs. yummy!

there was the surprise appearance of a new, old Nikon FE2. omg!

and last, but not least, there was my first kancil award. :) bronze in website category. yay!

i curi this photo from tiff.

update: i heard i acted like a complete drunken hooligan douchebag. to everyone who had the misfortune to interact with me that night, i’m so fucking sorry.

heard from my friend in leo burnett that yasmin ahmad passed away just minutes ago.

i’ve always looked forward to being able to work with her one day, but now i will never have that honour. from everything i’ve heard from friends and acquaintances, she embodied none of the rampant cynicism or nastiness or work-related politics in our industry. i regret never meeting her or telling her how much her work moved me.

malaysia has lost someone special today.

i’m crushed.

feels like i’ve reached one of those milestones that everyone has at some point in their lives. wondering what to do with my life. in fact, i’ve still not figured out what it is exactly that i want. i have no plans to stay in advertising forever. most of my family could (and still are) but i wonder if it was by choice or the lack of.

sure, i want to do something great. who doesn’t? but it doesn’t help when i haven’t defined it. no, i do not want to write the next malaysian novel based in a quaint little mining town or some horrible adolescent trash masquerading as child prodigy literature. i just want to do something that i will look back on and think “now holy shit, that was awesome, wasn’t it?” what is success? is it to be rolling in dough, supporting my family? winning international awards? getting married and settling down?

there must be other things out there to do but for some reason i’m stumped. what else can i do? i write ads, think of ideas to sell stuff, build brands, create awareness. and then we reach the end of the road. what else do i know how to do?

i don’t know.

you really want to know the difference between working in an ATL agency versus an interactive one?

in ATL, no one logs in to their facebook, no one checks their work mail, no one’s even heard of twitter, and general managers think BLOGS ARE THE NEW HOT THING.

here, everyone is twittering, there are group msn bitching sessions, everyone reads everyone else’s blog in full view of each other, and they’re all cyber-stalkers (hi, jook).

i feel so at home here.

so there haven’t been any quality posts in a while (we’ll just egotisticaly assume there were any to begin with). and i believe it’s due to an influx of happenings rather than a lack of it. but nyeaaah it’s not stuff that deserves to be shared with the likes of kimberly de silva type stalkers.

last week, the karen wong invited me and a few other colleagues to guest assess some student work at TOA. not only was i super honoured, i was completely gobsmacked. and then smug. oh, if only those extra-chromosomed high school “educators” could see me now. the budak kurang siuman, judging student work. HA! so what if i almost failed sejarah? i’m livin’ it up now, baby!

so anyway. i was having a little struggle, internally, about the kind of comments to make. sure, we’re all there to provide an advertising perspective on creatives and messaging, but how much commercialism were we supposed to impose on them? do we kill their creativity now? comment everything to death?

i didn’t want to say much or contribute heavy killer ad vibes into the room. i think karen’s friend yen sie needed no help. i did disagree with the rather client-y comments though. jook’s “client may not like this” statement was still palatable. what really threw me off was the “LOGO NOT BIG ENOUGH” sermon.

you have to start with work you’re happy with, work that you like, and then dumb it down as a compromise to the usual client feedback. if you start with a logo covering up 80% of your creative, there’s no where to go from there ‘cept art direction hell.

it was a good session for me. it’s all very nice and easy to critique work not your own, but i’m sure a lot of us are, from time to time, guilty of straying too far off brief or not keeping communication clear enough or hiding the big message under too many layers. it was a useful reminder.

one of the students (my personal favourite) posed a question about copywriting for ATL and how it differs from writing for the web. never good on my feet, i gave a rather shoddy answer, which i’d now like to append.

it was hard for me to find a clear distinction between “ATL” and “online” simply because i haven’t been doing just above-the-line work. it completely slipped my goldfish memory that i’ve also lived through a fair bit of torturous BTL and event work. just like working in an online medium, you plan out touchpoints and try to work in some consumer interactivity (the starcom job in particular was pretty fun). you think of POSMs which can engage your audience to read, see, touch, think. it’s no different from creating banners for the web. ok, perhaps only in the fact that web banners are infinitely more annoying.  so yeah, i was left stumped for 2 seconds wondering myself “what is the fucking difference?” the difference, i guess, is that you have to work that much harder to get your ad noticed. it’s getting noticed in the millions of pages of www versus being spotted in the 60-page dailies. it’s making use of any and all available real estate i.e. email, dashboards, titlebars, descriptors, RSS summaries, tweets etc. instead of planning just a headline, body and call-to-action in standard full-page spread.

don’t take it as god’s truth though. i’m still learning. :)