First things first…. If you are Singaporean and you have not noticed the uproar about Sarong Party Girl, you should crawl back into the cave you have been living in and feed on your ignorant soul. That is a bit harsh coz who really cares anyway?
Needless to say, I do care and I must give my two cents worth to this argument. Sarong Party Girl’s blog is one of the most interesting ones I have ever read. She is definitely out there doing her thing and basically living her life. Her blog personality at least is very, very direct and that in itself is commendable. I don’t agree with her philosophy in life and she is very offensive at times, but this is her blog and even if she has to some extent tailored her posts to catch the attention of her audience, who hasn’t? We should leave her to her own devices and move on.
Plus, she is also very, very young and tries to paint herself as a Carrie Bradshaw type of person. But if you have seen some of the posts she has put up in the last month, you get glimpses of how confused and directionless she is beneath the cock-sure veneer she tries to project through her writing. Give her a break. She’s not a super-human. What she is, is an opinionated, progressive kind of girl trying to make it in a world that embraces differences. Compromises have had to be made and if her ‘compromise’ has been to shed her conventions and be someone that causes people to turn their heads and look at her, it’s a compromise that has suited her well. Her recent fame is testament to that.
In my personal opinion, her blog has lost some of its lustre because now everyone reads it and no doubt, her expressions will be influenced by this new kind of attention she’s getting. It’s already happening. She has a comment section now.
***********************************************************************************
Enough about her, more about me, me, me. I don’t have leisure time anymore. Sure there are loads of hours in a day when I don’t have to do work but it’s never leisure time if u know what I mean. It’s like, ok, so there are 8 hours left before I sleep, so I should eat, relax, check mail, read a bit, go for a drive and maybe a cigarette and then come back and sleep. So basically what I am trying to say is that everything is planned. Even over the weekend, the mentality is such that we have to do as much as we can before work starts on Monday. It’s still fun, but it’s a bit exhausting at times and it will take some adjusting to.
However, if you go out of Colombo, everything changes and you can do as much you can and still feel content. Absolute bliss. A few of my newly found friends and I went down-south to the sun-smooched beaches this past weekend. Let me introduce them to you: Pierced chick, Flamboyant, Aussie-mate, Angel-eyes, Magic-box. We drank: arrack, wine and rum. We smoked: cigarettes and weeeeeed. We swam: pool and beach. We danced: room, club and synchronized in the pool. We ate: bbq, sri lankan food, continental breakfast and we slepttttt. It was by far the most fun trip I have ever taken. These guys, I hardly know them, were so understanding, non-judgmental and fun I was just blown away. Literally. Well not literally. Damn!!! Usually I feel glad when I get home but since the whole experience was just amazing I was kinda sad to get home.
Anyways, cheers to them for making my life just a bit better with their company and the endless supply of ze candiez.
Until next time, au revoir.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Monday, June 20, 2005
the worries
I really wanted to post twice today. I don’t know why but I feel I am neglecting my blog these days.
The last week was quite fun actually. I like work. I hate getting up for it but once I am there I enjoy what I do, even if it means calling up people and coaxing them to give u a videotaped interview. A lot of people are averse to the idea of being filmed on camera which comes as sort of a pleasant surprise because one finds out that people are not as superficial and camera-hungry as we think they are. I find it’s such a pleasure to meet humble people because you can learn so much from them. I do not profess to have learnt a lot from humble people but I know it’s made me not complain about life’s circumstances as much as I used to.
Anyway, I do not find it surprising at all that people don’t want to be filmed because I know I would hate it. One never realizes how hideous one’s voice is unless it is taped and played over for one to hear. I heard my voice on one of the interviews and I cringed so badly that the audio-visual guy gave me a big smirk. I take solace in the fact that people are quite used to my voice and because I am not, I should be the only one to actually profess distaste for it.
Going back to the subject of liking what I do, I feel that I am quite suited to this position. I love research, I am reasonably creative and I find its quite fun to give presentations especially if it is well researched and thought-over. I believe I need some experience on how to handle the stress of the job but I am confident I will fit in quite soon. However, I am not too sure about whether this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. If you are a marketer, there is only a small promotional ladder. I mean the possibilities are pretty vast but if your natural environment is planning with the client and starting from scratch, then jobs at the top of the ladder are not likely to offer you this and you might get bored of a management job. The money’s a good substitute but still…you know what I mean.
When I examine this issue under even more harsh lighting, I feel that I will never be deliriously happy in a corporate job. My passion’s always been to write, this blog being a by-product of this passion. Unfortunately I have never indulged my passions because I come from a conservative Sindhi family and doing anything non-business related is frowned upon as impractical and disaster. Families exhibit toxic love in these instances where they sabotage your every move just to move you in the direction they want you to move in. Luckily for me, I liked business subjects and I have no regrets in doing my studies in them but that does not mean I shouldn’t be able to pursue what I really want. There’s nothing stopping me except my own fear of failing miserably at it but I think I can wait until I have established myself reasonably in a world where wearing formal clothes in the day are a maxim.
Another thing that’s worrying me all the time is that I worry all the time. My friend once told me that I need to make myself happy first and not to try to make life easier for others, in other words, not to be a doormat. I find myself stuck, really desperately stuck where I worry that I am not making people happy. I worry and I worry until I feel sick to the stomach that nobody’s going to have a good time, or I should throw myself in the middle of a fight between two people I care about so as to stop the fighting. It sucks. My happiness is irrevocably tied in with other people’s happiness. Other people’s lives impose on me in the sense that my life is probably made up of diverse set of other people lives and I can’t live my life happily if one of those lives I am made up of is unhappy!!!! And yet, I come across as a selfish prick. Sometimes decisions have to be made and I make them and some people are left happy and some are not but because everyone is so used to getting their own point of view considered, BECAUSE I PAY ATTENTION TO EVERYONE’S OPINION, once their opinion is overruled, who gets to feel the brunt of the hostility? Lucky guess anyone?
I must sleep now… good night fuckers.
The last week was quite fun actually. I like work. I hate getting up for it but once I am there I enjoy what I do, even if it means calling up people and coaxing them to give u a videotaped interview. A lot of people are averse to the idea of being filmed on camera which comes as sort of a pleasant surprise because one finds out that people are not as superficial and camera-hungry as we think they are. I find it’s such a pleasure to meet humble people because you can learn so much from them. I do not profess to have learnt a lot from humble people but I know it’s made me not complain about life’s circumstances as much as I used to.
Anyway, I do not find it surprising at all that people don’t want to be filmed because I know I would hate it. One never realizes how hideous one’s voice is unless it is taped and played over for one to hear. I heard my voice on one of the interviews and I cringed so badly that the audio-visual guy gave me a big smirk. I take solace in the fact that people are quite used to my voice and because I am not, I should be the only one to actually profess distaste for it.
Going back to the subject of liking what I do, I feel that I am quite suited to this position. I love research, I am reasonably creative and I find its quite fun to give presentations especially if it is well researched and thought-over. I believe I need some experience on how to handle the stress of the job but I am confident I will fit in quite soon. However, I am not too sure about whether this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. If you are a marketer, there is only a small promotional ladder. I mean the possibilities are pretty vast but if your natural environment is planning with the client and starting from scratch, then jobs at the top of the ladder are not likely to offer you this and you might get bored of a management job. The money’s a good substitute but still…you know what I mean.
When I examine this issue under even more harsh lighting, I feel that I will never be deliriously happy in a corporate job. My passion’s always been to write, this blog being a by-product of this passion. Unfortunately I have never indulged my passions because I come from a conservative Sindhi family and doing anything non-business related is frowned upon as impractical and disaster. Families exhibit toxic love in these instances where they sabotage your every move just to move you in the direction they want you to move in. Luckily for me, I liked business subjects and I have no regrets in doing my studies in them but that does not mean I shouldn’t be able to pursue what I really want. There’s nothing stopping me except my own fear of failing miserably at it but I think I can wait until I have established myself reasonably in a world where wearing formal clothes in the day are a maxim.
Another thing that’s worrying me all the time is that I worry all the time. My friend once told me that I need to make myself happy first and not to try to make life easier for others, in other words, not to be a doormat. I find myself stuck, really desperately stuck where I worry that I am not making people happy. I worry and I worry until I feel sick to the stomach that nobody’s going to have a good time, or I should throw myself in the middle of a fight between two people I care about so as to stop the fighting. It sucks. My happiness is irrevocably tied in with other people’s happiness. Other people’s lives impose on me in the sense that my life is probably made up of diverse set of other people lives and I can’t live my life happily if one of those lives I am made up of is unhappy!!!! And yet, I come across as a selfish prick. Sometimes decisions have to be made and I make them and some people are left happy and some are not but because everyone is so used to getting their own point of view considered, BECAUSE I PAY ATTENTION TO EVERYONE’S OPINION, once their opinion is overruled, who gets to feel the brunt of the hostility? Lucky guess anyone?
I must sleep now… good night fuckers.
The Politicization of the Sacred
Song: Old Habits Die Hard- OST Alfie
Ambience: Harsh lighting
Emotional State: Seeking silver lining
Physical State: Groggy. Horny? Hmm…one and the same thing? Hmmm
We all know relationships suck. What we don’t know is how much they suck when you are trying to pursue one in Colombo. First of all, that’s all there is. Relationships that is. Dating does NOT exist. If a guy asks a girl out, then that means both the girl and the guy have known for quite sometime that mutual feelings exist and that once the first date is set up, they become each other’s special (without hyphen)friends. It is just so typical of how it works in Colombo. I am sure that this exists elsewhere in the world but I am just trying to observe a few things about the society I live in.
Let me analyze further coz it makes me feel really clever. I make a couple of very damning statements in the above paragraph. Let us take them one by one.
“the girl and the guy have known for quite sometime that mutual feeling exist”
We have to make a primary assumption here. One party, let us say the boy, develops feelings first. Then he divulges this piece of information to his best friend. The boy and his best friend will brainstorm on strategies on how to get to know this girl better and FIND OUT whether this girl COULD POSSIBLY like them back. Harking back to Grade 8? Wait… there’s more.
So eventually the girl finds out and, let us assume, that she does feel kinda positive towards this guy. The girl will deign to drop hints about her true feelings, not on the boy itself, but very possibly some third party affiliated with the boy’s friend contingent.
Why does this brainstorming session happen? Is it because the guy is too cowardly to ask the girl out directly or is it some kind of skill the guy has developed over the years? We are all afraid of rejection because it makes us feel so small and inconsequential. It is quite natural to find out more about how the other side feels before unlocking your emotional floodgates. It just makes more sense because NO ONE likes to be rejected. Cowardice in this case can be quite excusable.
But still, not every boy can be a coward right? I mean the laws of probability tell us that this is something not quite possible right? Sure there are only a few boys who go up to a girl and ask their hand in courtship without considering the consequences but this is something very, very, very rare. So what is the other explanation?
I am afraid that the answer finds itself in the form of a Colombo girl. If a guy does by chance ask her out, she will reject him outright regardless of whether she likes him or not. It’s this mental block they have that if they do agree to go out with this guy, she is just too easy. She must abstain, she must be pure, she must have a white sheet the morning after. It’s the art of persuasion which they like but so often verges on the ugly because both guy and girl play games to such an extent to end in a state of confusion and hurt. What other choice does the guy have but to find out more, more, more?
“Dating does NOT exist”
The above rant, does somehow explain this statement. I mean after investing sooo many resources on finding out what the other side thinks who would want something casual? It’s as if the whole time they were sneaking looks at each other, playing games, finding out about his/her life, gossiping about him/her they were actually dating.
It’s fucked up as they come. The games these people play do not exclude them from the laws of relationships. I mean that although a whole load of energy gets spent on useless speculation and information gathering, it does not mean the relationship will be any more successful than one which develops out of a casual dating experience.
In fact, speaking from personal, vicarious experience, the relationship equivalent of no-man’s land plays havoc on any chance there is for a relationship to even develop, much less last for a decent amount of time. Boy and girl go back and forth and someone always gets hurt. Whatever happened to romantic dates, all-night conversations, all-day smses and that flush in the cheeks? Something tells me that it all exists, but in Colombo, other things such as ego, pride and mutual distrust come in the way. The situation’s changing slowly but mental blocks this prevalent are difficult to do away with.
Sad.
Ambience: Harsh lighting
Emotional State: Seeking silver lining
Physical State: Groggy. Horny? Hmm…one and the same thing? Hmmm
We all know relationships suck. What we don’t know is how much they suck when you are trying to pursue one in Colombo. First of all, that’s all there is. Relationships that is. Dating does NOT exist. If a guy asks a girl out, then that means both the girl and the guy have known for quite sometime that mutual feelings exist and that once the first date is set up, they become each other’s special (without hyphen)friends. It is just so typical of how it works in Colombo. I am sure that this exists elsewhere in the world but I am just trying to observe a few things about the society I live in.
Let me analyze further coz it makes me feel really clever. I make a couple of very damning statements in the above paragraph. Let us take them one by one.
“the girl and the guy have known for quite sometime that mutual feeling exist”
We have to make a primary assumption here. One party, let us say the boy, develops feelings first. Then he divulges this piece of information to his best friend. The boy and his best friend will brainstorm on strategies on how to get to know this girl better and FIND OUT whether this girl COULD POSSIBLY like them back. Harking back to Grade 8? Wait… there’s more.
So eventually the girl finds out and, let us assume, that she does feel kinda positive towards this guy. The girl will deign to drop hints about her true feelings, not on the boy itself, but very possibly some third party affiliated with the boy’s friend contingent.
Why does this brainstorming session happen? Is it because the guy is too cowardly to ask the girl out directly or is it some kind of skill the guy has developed over the years? We are all afraid of rejection because it makes us feel so small and inconsequential. It is quite natural to find out more about how the other side feels before unlocking your emotional floodgates. It just makes more sense because NO ONE likes to be rejected. Cowardice in this case can be quite excusable.
But still, not every boy can be a coward right? I mean the laws of probability tell us that this is something not quite possible right? Sure there are only a few boys who go up to a girl and ask their hand in courtship without considering the consequences but this is something very, very, very rare. So what is the other explanation?
I am afraid that the answer finds itself in the form of a Colombo girl. If a guy does by chance ask her out, she will reject him outright regardless of whether she likes him or not. It’s this mental block they have that if they do agree to go out with this guy, she is just too easy. She must abstain, she must be pure, she must have a white sheet the morning after. It’s the art of persuasion which they like but so often verges on the ugly because both guy and girl play games to such an extent to end in a state of confusion and hurt. What other choice does the guy have but to find out more, more, more?
“Dating does NOT exist”
The above rant, does somehow explain this statement. I mean after investing sooo many resources on finding out what the other side thinks who would want something casual? It’s as if the whole time they were sneaking looks at each other, playing games, finding out about his/her life, gossiping about him/her they were actually dating.
It’s fucked up as they come. The games these people play do not exclude them from the laws of relationships. I mean that although a whole load of energy gets spent on useless speculation and information gathering, it does not mean the relationship will be any more successful than one which develops out of a casual dating experience.
In fact, speaking from personal, vicarious experience, the relationship equivalent of no-man’s land plays havoc on any chance there is for a relationship to even develop, much less last for a decent amount of time. Boy and girl go back and forth and someone always gets hurt. Whatever happened to romantic dates, all-night conversations, all-day smses and that flush in the cheeks? Something tells me that it all exists, but in Colombo, other things such as ego, pride and mutual distrust come in the way. The situation’s changing slowly but mental blocks this prevalent are difficult to do away with.
Sad.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
everything's fantastic...in retrospect
RESULTS!
It’s been a fucking experience the past 11 days. It really has. I’ve just about experienced every emotion in that period of time. Oh well, not really, but definitely a diverse range. Let’s start at the beginning. The 31st of May.
Results day dawned, like always, without a whimper, except perhaps the usual shout out going out to Allah from the Mosque that is close to our house. I woke up, had my lunch and decided I should meet Ash for coffee. Before meeting her I knew I would need some cigarettes considering my heart was starting to beat a bit faster with the thought of results coming out and the thought of drinking coffee AND smoking cigarettes. It really does feel good. I’m not some SATC sell-out. I am, I am. Sigh.
Well then, by the time I got to the place where she was lunching with a friend they had got fed up with the ambience so we decided to go somewhere else. We decided, minus the friend, to go Ash’s penthouse poolside. Ah…the luxury. We pseudo-sunned ourselves while having our beverages and talked about the various happenings in our life. It was kinda fun. Ashanie is one crude girl when she wants to be. Anyway the hilarity of it all wore off when at 5.15pm I realized that results had been out for FIFTEEN whole minutes. We rushed upstairs logged on and checked my results. Oh it was a bit nerve wracking. I got pretty decent-average grades so it was very anti-climatic. I mean if they had been very bad, I would have been pretty shocked and sad and very possibly I could have cried and if they had been excellent, I know I would have been jumping around. Good grades always give me a super high. So my results were:
Human Resource Management: A-
South Asia: People, Culture and Development: A
Asia the Modern World: B+
Service Marketing: B
I’m a bit disappointed with my grades but I know I shouldn’t be coz I really was pretty distracted last semester and to get these results is positively great but you know, the eternal hope always shines bright even in the dimmest of circumstances. So after much deliberation I pick the “content” emotion amongst many.
THE FUCKED-UPNESS OF SRI LANKAN BUSINESS
My workplace called me and told me that my first day of work would be the 2nd of June. So after spending a sleepless night I woke up at the un-godly hour of 7.30am and got dressed hyperactively in my official best. By the way, the sleeplessness of the previous night was not due to nervousness but coz I am sooo used to sleeping at 4am that the shock of sleeping at 11.45pm was just too much for my system to accept.
Anyway, I tiptoe in the office at exactly 9am and the receptionist tells me to sit down on the comfortable couches. Leo Burnett Solutions does not fit into the stereotypical hot shot firm very possibly located in one of those skyscraper buildings or takes up a monolithic building looking very modern etc. In fact, the office is built into an old Victorian-style house with a compound for parking cars at the front. The front of the building is made of glass which opens into the reception area. This area is not air conditioned. There are huge industrial fans blowing on either side of the reception and there are tiny chimes hanging from the ceiling which are forever tinkling. There are cool coppery ash trays located everywhere in the building. So all in all, the whole interior takes on a very rustic appearance.
Anyway, I formed a very, very positive impression of the place because not only did the place fit my bill for a cool place but the people walking in seemed very friendly and laid-back. My superior, Murtaza, a.k.a Matt, greets me and tells me that he is expecting me but his superior has not briefed him on what exactly I am going to do. He takes me to our superiors, so to speak and Mr. Michael Holsinger basically apologizes to me about how disorganized they are and tells me to come back on the 6th of June. He says this without the slightest indication of how very humiliating and embarrassing this going to be for ME so I tiptoe out again seething with anger. I know I need THEM more than they need ME but..but.. yeah.. it hurt my pride like hell. I have heard sooo many good things about Michael that I did not really want to thing bad about him but I am human after all.
I get home and my mother surprisingly does not laugh and is glad to have me back so she can fuss around me. I make a mental note that I will make use these next few days of holiday fully and with no guilt so I just jump into the sack and fall asleep for the next 4 hours. Ha ha.
But Sri Lankan business has a long way to go.
FIRST WEEK @ LEO BURNETT SOLUTIONS, SRI LANKA
So the much awaited Monday comes along and I make a conscious effort I shall be all relaxed and cool so as to make a favourable impression on everyone. Ha. I try my best never to kiss ass, but I didn’t know what to expect.
I didn’t have to kiss any ass because EVERYONE was very cool to me. I got my own desk in the Brand Planning and Client Servicing Department. This is the biggest department in the firm along with the Creative Department. Basically what this department does is that it meets up with the clients who want to launch an advertising campaign and then gets all the details from them. They then conduct the necessary research of the target consumers and use various resources to come up with a vague idea of what the campaign will look like.
For example, if GAP came to LBS and told them to launch a print campaign, LBS would then conduct research and find out that the 14-26 old age group would be the most viable and that magazines such as Cleo, Vogue, Playboy and GQ would be most effective. The department also has responsibility for coming with the creative idea before passing the job onto the Creative Department. What this means is that it tries to provide as much as relevant information to the creative department so as to inspire them. For example, if the brand planning department finds out that most men in the 14-26 age group are also avid PlayStation fans, and if they think that it’s a relevant characteristic of their personality, in the sense that it’s an indication of how competitive, childish they are and if they think it’s something that the creative department can use to come up with an ad, they inform them of this in what is called a creative brief or memo. The creative department can usually overrule what the brand planning department tells them to do but since they are so very busy they usually follow the train of thought that originates with our department.
This kind of thing excites me because I love doing research and finding out exactly who the consumer is and I also love being able to contribute creative ideas about interesting aspects of the consumer’s personality. My first job was based on launching a website for a Fashion Knitwear company branch in Sri Lanka but headquartered in Germany. I had to write a report on how they could communicate the existence of this website to the stakeholders as well as potential clients and employees as well as to attract repeated usage. It was quite a small thing to do but I managed to conduct some research and wrote a 3 page report on it. My superior, Matt liked it quite a bit and decided that it was good enough to send to the client directly with minimal correction. This bit of praise really helped me out because I was finding it very hard not to fall asleep because I have never been called on to be attentive for 8-9 hours straight.
My second project was to analyze a bit of research done by LBS for one of their clients who want to re-launch their product which is a brand of milk powder for mother’s and kids. I had to look at this research and conduct my own primary research to come up with new, innovative ideas of how to launch the milk powder. Since milk is such a routine and boring product and also that advertisements usually show the same thing (mum’s calling their kids in to drink milk) it was something of a challenge. We (another intern and I) had a very tight boundary to work within because we couldn’t go way out there coz the target audience is still relatively unsophisticated.
We collected our research by going out to a mall to ask mother-like figures questions. This was surprisingly quite a pleasant thing to do because mostly all the people we asked were very friendly and helpful. Anyway, our final product was not a report but what is called a ‘Concept Board’ in the advertising fraternity. A concept board is basically a collage of pictures which when collectively viewed give you a clear idea of who your target audience is. In the sense if you were to advertise, for example a Football match, a concept board would show pictures of something that would clearly explain who your target audience was; therefore pictures of beer, chips, a couch, a few porn magazines would tell you exactly what the alpha-male was interested in.
So at the end we collected pictures of tea parties, recipes, soap opera ads, romance novel covers, working mother stuff, telephones etc. It wasn’t anything too new or anything but I hope that my creative brief will impress them more than our concept board.
I come home everyday around 6pm totally shagged which is the only bitch in the whole experience (and getting up early) but I suppose I will get used to it. I hope so coz I need a social life.
THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL AND ADVERTISING?
My first week at this amazing firm came to an end last night when they had an office gathering/party. I didn’t know this but the Cannes Film Festival, in addition to screening films also screens the best television advertisements for that year. So what LBS usually does is that they acquire the entire reel of the 50 ads they show at Cannes and screens it for their employees and their biggest clients in order to inspire them and also just to meet up and mingle. These ads were amazing and really, they were fucking inspirational. The ‘Intelligent Shoe’ ad by Adidas was one of them and McDonalds came up with some great ones too. Basically they provided each of us with a form with the list of advertisements. We have to mark out what we think are the 20 best advertisements so that when the results are announced next week, the scores of each form are tallied up and the three highest scores get some prizes which include a holiday at some beach resort, a mobile phone, a bottle of liquor and some other shite. Fun!
There was a dress code for this party too. We all had to wear something red and they painted our faces with red and white paint to make us look like warriors. I don’t know exactly why but it was great fun. There was a bar too! Free drinks! The long island iced teas were gross and I got drunk on two of them but of course that didn’t stop me. I hung with Matt and this girl called Shehara in the creative department. She is very cool. Piercings everywhere! Rock on! And oh yes, Matt, is 24 years old and is an awesome, awesome guy. I am very happy to have him as my boss. And Michael, the guy I very briefly hated, is very funny and lets you smoke with him on his rounds around the office.
After that met up with friends at Clancy’s and got drunk on arrack, B&H and beer. Came home at 2.45am.
Early night. Yawn
Song playing: Wonderwall- Ryan Adams
Movie about to be played: Osama
Food about to be eaten: Apple
I’ve got a date tomorrow! Yay!
It’s been a fucking experience the past 11 days. It really has. I’ve just about experienced every emotion in that period of time. Oh well, not really, but definitely a diverse range. Let’s start at the beginning. The 31st of May.
Results day dawned, like always, without a whimper, except perhaps the usual shout out going out to Allah from the Mosque that is close to our house. I woke up, had my lunch and decided I should meet Ash for coffee. Before meeting her I knew I would need some cigarettes considering my heart was starting to beat a bit faster with the thought of results coming out and the thought of drinking coffee AND smoking cigarettes. It really does feel good. I’m not some SATC sell-out. I am, I am. Sigh.
Well then, by the time I got to the place where she was lunching with a friend they had got fed up with the ambience so we decided to go somewhere else. We decided, minus the friend, to go Ash’s penthouse poolside. Ah…the luxury. We pseudo-sunned ourselves while having our beverages and talked about the various happenings in our life. It was kinda fun. Ashanie is one crude girl when she wants to be. Anyway the hilarity of it all wore off when at 5.15pm I realized that results had been out for FIFTEEN whole minutes. We rushed upstairs logged on and checked my results. Oh it was a bit nerve wracking. I got pretty decent-average grades so it was very anti-climatic. I mean if they had been very bad, I would have been pretty shocked and sad and very possibly I could have cried and if they had been excellent, I know I would have been jumping around. Good grades always give me a super high. So my results were:
Human Resource Management: A-
South Asia: People, Culture and Development: A
Asia the Modern World: B+
Service Marketing: B
I’m a bit disappointed with my grades but I know I shouldn’t be coz I really was pretty distracted last semester and to get these results is positively great but you know, the eternal hope always shines bright even in the dimmest of circumstances. So after much deliberation I pick the “content” emotion amongst many.
THE FUCKED-UPNESS OF SRI LANKAN BUSINESS
My workplace called me and told me that my first day of work would be the 2nd of June. So after spending a sleepless night I woke up at the un-godly hour of 7.30am and got dressed hyperactively in my official best. By the way, the sleeplessness of the previous night was not due to nervousness but coz I am sooo used to sleeping at 4am that the shock of sleeping at 11.45pm was just too much for my system to accept.
Anyway, I tiptoe in the office at exactly 9am and the receptionist tells me to sit down on the comfortable couches. Leo Burnett Solutions does not fit into the stereotypical hot shot firm very possibly located in one of those skyscraper buildings or takes up a monolithic building looking very modern etc. In fact, the office is built into an old Victorian-style house with a compound for parking cars at the front. The front of the building is made of glass which opens into the reception area. This area is not air conditioned. There are huge industrial fans blowing on either side of the reception and there are tiny chimes hanging from the ceiling which are forever tinkling. There are cool coppery ash trays located everywhere in the building. So all in all, the whole interior takes on a very rustic appearance.
Anyway, I formed a very, very positive impression of the place because not only did the place fit my bill for a cool place but the people walking in seemed very friendly and laid-back. My superior, Murtaza, a.k.a Matt, greets me and tells me that he is expecting me but his superior has not briefed him on what exactly I am going to do. He takes me to our superiors, so to speak and Mr. Michael Holsinger basically apologizes to me about how disorganized they are and tells me to come back on the 6th of June. He says this without the slightest indication of how very humiliating and embarrassing this going to be for ME so I tiptoe out again seething with anger. I know I need THEM more than they need ME but..but.. yeah.. it hurt my pride like hell. I have heard sooo many good things about Michael that I did not really want to thing bad about him but I am human after all.
I get home and my mother surprisingly does not laugh and is glad to have me back so she can fuss around me. I make a mental note that I will make use these next few days of holiday fully and with no guilt so I just jump into the sack and fall asleep for the next 4 hours. Ha ha.
But Sri Lankan business has a long way to go.
FIRST WEEK @ LEO BURNETT SOLUTIONS, SRI LANKA
So the much awaited Monday comes along and I make a conscious effort I shall be all relaxed and cool so as to make a favourable impression on everyone. Ha. I try my best never to kiss ass, but I didn’t know what to expect.
I didn’t have to kiss any ass because EVERYONE was very cool to me. I got my own desk in the Brand Planning and Client Servicing Department. This is the biggest department in the firm along with the Creative Department. Basically what this department does is that it meets up with the clients who want to launch an advertising campaign and then gets all the details from them. They then conduct the necessary research of the target consumers and use various resources to come up with a vague idea of what the campaign will look like.
For example, if GAP came to LBS and told them to launch a print campaign, LBS would then conduct research and find out that the 14-26 old age group would be the most viable and that magazines such as Cleo, Vogue, Playboy and GQ would be most effective. The department also has responsibility for coming with the creative idea before passing the job onto the Creative Department. What this means is that it tries to provide as much as relevant information to the creative department so as to inspire them. For example, if the brand planning department finds out that most men in the 14-26 age group are also avid PlayStation fans, and if they think that it’s a relevant characteristic of their personality, in the sense that it’s an indication of how competitive, childish they are and if they think it’s something that the creative department can use to come up with an ad, they inform them of this in what is called a creative brief or memo. The creative department can usually overrule what the brand planning department tells them to do but since they are so very busy they usually follow the train of thought that originates with our department.
This kind of thing excites me because I love doing research and finding out exactly who the consumer is and I also love being able to contribute creative ideas about interesting aspects of the consumer’s personality. My first job was based on launching a website for a Fashion Knitwear company branch in Sri Lanka but headquartered in Germany. I had to write a report on how they could communicate the existence of this website to the stakeholders as well as potential clients and employees as well as to attract repeated usage. It was quite a small thing to do but I managed to conduct some research and wrote a 3 page report on it. My superior, Matt liked it quite a bit and decided that it was good enough to send to the client directly with minimal correction. This bit of praise really helped me out because I was finding it very hard not to fall asleep because I have never been called on to be attentive for 8-9 hours straight.
My second project was to analyze a bit of research done by LBS for one of their clients who want to re-launch their product which is a brand of milk powder for mother’s and kids. I had to look at this research and conduct my own primary research to come up with new, innovative ideas of how to launch the milk powder. Since milk is such a routine and boring product and also that advertisements usually show the same thing (mum’s calling their kids in to drink milk) it was something of a challenge. We (another intern and I) had a very tight boundary to work within because we couldn’t go way out there coz the target audience is still relatively unsophisticated.
We collected our research by going out to a mall to ask mother-like figures questions. This was surprisingly quite a pleasant thing to do because mostly all the people we asked were very friendly and helpful. Anyway, our final product was not a report but what is called a ‘Concept Board’ in the advertising fraternity. A concept board is basically a collage of pictures which when collectively viewed give you a clear idea of who your target audience is. In the sense if you were to advertise, for example a Football match, a concept board would show pictures of something that would clearly explain who your target audience was; therefore pictures of beer, chips, a couch, a few porn magazines would tell you exactly what the alpha-male was interested in.
So at the end we collected pictures of tea parties, recipes, soap opera ads, romance novel covers, working mother stuff, telephones etc. It wasn’t anything too new or anything but I hope that my creative brief will impress them more than our concept board.
I come home everyday around 6pm totally shagged which is the only bitch in the whole experience (and getting up early) but I suppose I will get used to it. I hope so coz I need a social life.
THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL AND ADVERTISING?
My first week at this amazing firm came to an end last night when they had an office gathering/party. I didn’t know this but the Cannes Film Festival, in addition to screening films also screens the best television advertisements for that year. So what LBS usually does is that they acquire the entire reel of the 50 ads they show at Cannes and screens it for their employees and their biggest clients in order to inspire them and also just to meet up and mingle. These ads were amazing and really, they were fucking inspirational. The ‘Intelligent Shoe’ ad by Adidas was one of them and McDonalds came up with some great ones too. Basically they provided each of us with a form with the list of advertisements. We have to mark out what we think are the 20 best advertisements so that when the results are announced next week, the scores of each form are tallied up and the three highest scores get some prizes which include a holiday at some beach resort, a mobile phone, a bottle of liquor and some other shite. Fun!
There was a dress code for this party too. We all had to wear something red and they painted our faces with red and white paint to make us look like warriors. I don’t know exactly why but it was great fun. There was a bar too! Free drinks! The long island iced teas were gross and I got drunk on two of them but of course that didn’t stop me. I hung with Matt and this girl called Shehara in the creative department. She is very cool. Piercings everywhere! Rock on! And oh yes, Matt, is 24 years old and is an awesome, awesome guy. I am very happy to have him as my boss. And Michael, the guy I very briefly hated, is very funny and lets you smoke with him on his rounds around the office.
After that met up with friends at Clancy’s and got drunk on arrack, B&H and beer. Came home at 2.45am.
Early night. Yawn
Song playing: Wonderwall- Ryan Adams
Movie about to be played: Osama
Food about to be eaten: Apple
I’ve got a date tomorrow! Yay!
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