annoying dick A: oooh, is that the new <client’s product>?

simpering fool B: yes! it is the new <client’s product>!

annoying dick A: wow! does it have <product benefit 1>?

simpering fool B: not only does it have that, it also has <product benefit 2> <product benefit 3> <product benefit 4>!

annoying dick A: i also heard it is now <discounted price> with <current promo>!

simpering fool B: you are right! i’ve already gotten 20 million of these <client’s product> at <discounted price>! what about you?

annoying dick A and simpering fool B burst into fake laughter.

radio format 2

whiny asshole A: oh, i’m so sick of <random dumb fuck problem> happening to me!

smug self righteous prick B: really? you mean you still haven’t discovered <product benefit> of <client’s product>?

whiny asshole A: no, i’ve never heard of <product benefit> of <client’s product>! tell me what is it!

smug self righteous prick B: well, <client’s product> is very efficient at <product benefit> and now it comes with <extra benefit> too!

whiny asshole A: oh! i’m going out to grab <client’s product> now to solve my <random dumb fuck problem> today!

whiny asshole A and smug self righteous prick together: because <product tagline>!

whiny asshole A and smug self righteous prick burst into bout of fake laughter

footnote: radio commercials have no full stops. every sentence ends with either an exclamation mark or multiple questions marks.

Sure that’s a relevant statement for our industry.

Or it used to be. ATL. Digital. It’s not the same animal.

I’m going to get shot, drawn and quartered by a few old dogs for saying this, but sometimes you don’t need a big idea.

“What’s the big idea?” maybe it’s more just “What’s the great idea?”

It’s an execution idea. It’s a tech idea. It’s a social idea. It’s an awesome interaction idea. It’s a crowdsourcing idea. It’s a viral idea. It’s fun. It’s entertaining. It’s experiential.

Don’t force us to fit our ideas under some generic “big” line. It doesn’t work that way. Sometimes, it even stops working that way. Hold on to a new media idea too hard, try to tame it, box it in, give it a collar and it’ll just wither away and die.

What’s the big idea here?

It’s a guy. On a bike. And it’s just fucking awesome.

I now eat at regular human time, which has freaked me out.

No, I’m not going to talk about work. Posting biz-related stuff on a public (i.e. unlocked, you idiot. Hiding your url and getting hissy won’t make it magically disappear from spiders) blog. Unless it’s good. And also not some P&C stuff guaranteed to get you escorted out the building by two burly security guards.

So within the third week, they lugged me to a client presso. That, I really appreciate, cos y’know I haven’t been in almost two years.

Just saying.

X number of years ago on the same day, my life began – my foray into the world of advertising. some may say, with a cynical toss of the head, that i actually commemorate the day my soul died. but i’m feeling optimistic at this moment in time, and we shall leave it at that.

i remember my first brief, for nokia. my idea had smileys and emoticons and people (but perhaps it was a sign of things to come). it never ran. i remember my first headline which went to print, how exciting. it was for a levi’s roadshow. there were some lines which survived the day, gasping their last breaths just before production. i was disappointed, but i soon learned, them’s the breaks.

i met a handful of people i loved, and oodles and buckets and mountains of people i loathed. some stirred up tiny feelings of ambivalence. some i still meet with over beery chats, which i enjoy very much.

there were print ads. tvcs, oh the joy. events. the two whole radio scripts. promos, oh the horror. pitches when i wrote. pitches when i did naught. pitches when i created shitty huge mega-megabyte flash animation files for work which we were never going to get. i despaired much, but i’d like to think i learned something from everyone whose paths i crossed. and hey, i also wrote some lines which i love till today.

obviously, i left. partly because of the money, largely because of something that resembles dirty linen and waving it around in public view, which may be discussed over a cheap nescafe ais, as i’ll never mention it here. are you stupid?

i thought i was geeky enough. too geeky for mainstream, so off to digital i went. and maybe it was a wrong choice, because i missed my tv spots, and my script writing, and my events and activities and even my little point-of-sale materials. who’d have thunk it. but i learned about user experience. wow, a media that spoke to the masses, and in turn reacted, which forced me to anticipate, guess and then second guess it. i felt i wasn’t doing it right. hey, it’s still so new. was anyone really “getting” it? was there really any one way, or two ways, or any way to get it right?

some people think they have all the answer to it. i don’t. if i did, you could smack me silly and call me droga. but hello hello,  i picked up some awards in this medium where i failed to in the other three. not a cannes nor an ad&d or any other show which would have quadrupled my pay and sent hasil groveling at my doorstep, because i’m an underachiever like that. but i’m proud of them and they mean something to me.

it probably wouldn’t to anyone else. if you have stacks of gold and black lego bricks forming a massive igloo around your heads, why bother? if you’ve picked up “best of show” or “golden kancil”, ditto. if you’re too good for this world, turning up your nose at atl people and sneering at me because i have X years experience to your X+Y,  bravo.

new pastures await. as usual, i don’t know if i’m making the right choice. agency A signed me up, agency B just offered. i’ll do what will allow me to sleep at night and hope the carrot is still waiting when i’m ready. is this pasture greener? i’m not so naive to think so. different? that’s all i’m looking for. i plan to add other adjectives myself.

no, i’m not melancholy. not brooding. just observing and stating. feels like i’ve been hiding everything from prying cock stares for so long (it’s not like i mind the judging mind you, i just like controlling what you read, like big brother) and today i sort of felt like sharing.

goodnight.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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. :)

why?

simple.

it’s too blatantly retarded. sure everyone is honing in on the fact that there is a little under-the-table rimming going on. but that aside, come on. making loudspeaker announcements to a group of colleagues over dinner says enough.

office politics is sneaky. it involves a lot of bald-faced lies and skulking about. it takes more than a little fact-juggling and crafty psychological games. most of all, it takes some mental acuity (which he’s clearly lacking).

shorty’s insincere shows of concern, unsuccessful dirt-digging, name-dropping, back-patting and colleague-debasing is so painfully obvious i could cry.

come on, guys, don’t give him that much credit. he ain’t a politician. he just has some insecurities and esteem issues he needs to work out. with doctor phil and oprah.

awesome jenga is awesome

what’s that tim? a “sports” injury?