Proximity/BBDO Guerrero needs a writer (Or, Why I haven't updated this blog in ages)

Hello, I would like to have more time to blog, tweet and go web window shopping. Conclusion: we need to hire more copywriters for Proximity.

If you are already a copywriter in an existing agency, send in your resume and portfolio to pia.roxas@proximity.com.ph right now! (If you have done so previously, it would be superfluous to send it again.) If you aren't sensitive about these things, it would be more efficient if you already give an indication of your current salary.

If you have just recently graduated, accomplish the copy test below and send it in by 6pm on Friday, June 19, 2009. Oh, it would be cool if you had a cover letter and CV too.

Go ahead, eat my brainz.

Zombies ate my brains 5 times over the weekend.
They somehow got through the lawn's defenses and made it into the house. I should have added some snow pea shooters.

Before that, I had to wait a bit for the game to download, so I collected some jewels in Paris on my mobile phone. I earned more than 60k on Jewel Twist.

I love casual games.
Just in the last week, I spent Php 500 on casual gaming downloaded through the net and mobile. Games allow me to kill zombies in my backyard. Check if someone would date me or ditch me. Or play Othello with my hubby while waiting for our food to arrive.

It’s something that's fun virtually, but I wouldn't want to do in real life. A sentiment I’m sure gamers in Halo or Counterstrike would share (at least without proper training).

Platforms that let us explore realities we can’t experience in real life, check.

Games that I’d like to do but can't do in real life - how well do they work?
Unlike House of the Dead or Samurai sword, I don’t see a lot of people playing that game in Timezone where you get to do skateboard tricks.

I guess the kids already do it in real life. But I tried it, it was fun. Just that it was too real. Not real in the sense that it feels like I was on a real skateboard in a real skatepark. (It felt close though.)
But real in the sense that the likelihood of failing was higher than the likelihood of doing well.

The most enjoyable games give a sense of accomplishment - levels cleared, a story finished, a mission accomplished. Even if I’m cut a little (or maybe even a lot of) slack. Like a second life, for example.

That second life is significant too, in that, would I be interested in taking it? A game’s ability to hold your attention, changing with conditions and adapting to behaviors in a complex way WOULD keep me playing it.
In the same way that babies watch parents’ faces so furtively because of the complex changes that occur in it so quickly.

I keep trying Pop Cap games because their best games are so well executed. Not just as gaming experiences or stories, but as things to look at and hear. Things like SFX, well-developed looks and animation, hold my attention and make their games a pleasure to play.

In the end, the things that keep us rapt in attention, are the things that we can relate to, not as someone in communications, but just a plain ‘someone’. Chances are, if you find it fun. Someone else will too.

It’s that simple.

Is our nostalgia a crutch?

My closest friends and I were born across 1979 and 1980.
And I know every generation thinks this of itself, but I really do believe that our generation is unique.

We were alive at the peak of mass broadcasting, sandwiched between genX, the MTV generation & genY. Post-martial law deprivation, we grew up feeding on our parents’ media gluttony. Fat and happy on our 80s TV, music videos and family computers, we followed the format wars from BetaMax, then VHS rentals through laser discs, compact discs, and now, HD & Blu-Ray.

Sometimes I still have to shake off the urge to go to Odessey or Music One to buy the music I want. Riiight, it doesn’t even have to come in a CD now. Or some with argue, with a purchase.

Unlike our younger sisters & brothers (born in the 90s, imagine!), we saw the shift from analogue to digital. And unlike our parents, we don’t have the excuse of ignorance. Not quite as wide-eyed as our parents, but not quite as savvy as our younger siblings, again, we find ourselves in between.

Don’t get us wrong, it seems to be a happy in-between.

Get any number of us around a dinner table and start a conversation on any 80s cartoon or TV show, and wham! The ice is Care Bear stared. It’s almost a cliché, the way we light up at the mention of He-Man, She-Ra or the Thunder Cats Hoooe! Look at me, even I’m smiling as I write this.

We will be the last generation to have shared exactly the same TV fodder at a mass scale. Classic movies through Holy Week on RPN 9 & Channel 13; McGyver, Duck Tales on Saturday morning, X-Men/Batman Dark Knight/Spiderman on Friday Nights. Beverly Hills 90210 (original!). We test each other on ‘obscure’ shows – Parker Lewis can’t lose, California Dreams, the Charmings.

Heck, we’ll be the last generation to share TV. What with people now picking & choosing their own content at their own times.

We will be the last generation to have shared nostalgia over media.

It’s happy. It’s comfortable. It’s fun. We all know it. And that’s why it’s a crutch.
I just came from Terminator Salvation (I saw all the other Terminators on Million Dollar Movies). Before the show, there was a trailer for the new Transformers. A week before, I’d seen the new Star Trek. A month ago, it was Watchmen. Where the wild things are is coming up. And many more besides.

With varying success, directors are taking nostalgic icons to make films of cultural significance, instead of making their own, new, personal visions. The way most great cinema starts. It’s profitable. And I suppose producers have to cash in on this last nostalgic generation. But IMHO, it kills the possibility of better things.

Sure they may not hit nostalgic notes, but it will be fresh, exciting, surprising, and definitely water cooler ready.

Marketers are killjoys

I just came from a big Nestle initiative to go Cannes-worthy. More than 100 people in business attire, listening to a colleague talk about digital work.
It was insightful, very informative and quite comprehensive. But heck, was it boring.
While he was preparing for his talk, I happened to know that he was consulting an Ogilvy presentation. Again, from a big agency conference with this booklet handed out that aims to frame digital work.

It had speakers in business profile pictures. There was a table of contents and tabs to separate the topics. It was hefty and square.
It was boring.

Everyday, “social media experts” tweet around the “newest”, “most interesting”, “very useful” article on “the next big thing on social media”, “how to leverage social media for profit”, “getting your ROI on social media”, “10 ways to be successful in social media”, ETCETERA.

They’re long articles with business-type headers and business-like people looking back at you from their business suits.

They’re boring.

Just yesterday, I opened yet another flash mob attempt in my inbox. Remember when they were really thrilling? And really surprised?
Now they’ve just gotten boring.

Virals? Apps? Boring! (AND fake!)

Marketers are approaching a half-naked-in-the-bedroom, totally random, freedom via anonymity, dada-esque ugly, and most importantly, FUN medium into something they can hopefully measure, bottle and sell to very proper, business-like brand marketing teams.

And making it boring in the process.

The internet is not something that can be plotted out and forecasted. It won’t take an “expert” to tell you that anything can come out of the internet tomorrow and it’ll be the next big thing. At the very least, it cannot be approached in a linear, causal way. Have you BEEN on the internet?

The way we’re behaving, if the internet were a forum even I’d kick marketers out.
Maybe doing your job isn’t fun. But please don't make it not fun for everyone.

Please say I’m a social media expert with bunny ears.

Whenever someone says “I’m a social media expert”, somewhere, an internet fairy dies.

I do hope all these people who say they are social media experts preface it with quotation marks. Because in an evolving field, can anyone be an expert?

Come to think of it, yes.


But I don’t think it’s anyone who would say they’re “social media experts”.

It’s the people who use the media who are finding clever ways to apply new media in ways unique to their needs and lifestyles. And it makes sense. Wouldn’t the democratization of the media mean the expertise (slash power) lies in the users, not with publishers or marketers?

I always look to TelCos – purveyors of the original social media - at least here in Manila. And even they, innovative as they are with their products and services, are outstripped by their subscribers.

Last year, Globe announced a partnership with rural banks to adapt a microlending debtor-payee platform using G-cash. An application that was happened upon first by individual microlending agents who found mobile cash an easy way to overcome mountain passes & bad infrastructure. 2 years ago. That first microlending agent who used g-cash, there’s a real social media expert there.

Whoever made the first LOLcat. The founder of 4chan. Kutiman. I think those guys are real media experts because they, well, got it. They created content or platforms that people found relevant and rewarding in the long-run.

As for the rest of us who are expected to come up with magic formula for the next big thing, with all due respect, I don’t think we can. We make educated guesses. Take our out-dated measures and past successes, and try to come up with what COULD maybe work with our audience.

Really, aren’t we all just social media prospectors? In a field that evolves by the hour, we're all still just figuring out how to walk, even while we talk the talk.