Flying to New York on 09.11.11 Finds a Paranoid and Collectively Depressed Nation on Arrival

Those little town blues

Flying from Asia to New York is punctuated by an announcement on the PA from the pilot leaving Taiwan that says they are required by US law to tell passengers that they are not allowed to congregate in groups of more than two, anywhere on the aircraft during flight. It is only a small notion of the American paranoia to follow. You don't hear that going to China. On the flight from San Fran to NYC the first sign that America is in deep shit is that there is no free food on the flight as there had been from Saigon to Taipei and Taipei to San Francisco. Nope. You can buy a breakfast cookie for $3 on American Airlines or a limp shrink-wrapped croissant with ham and cheese for $6. It sucks. Welcome to the good ole US of A. Time to pay for everything - including the free-everywhere-else carts that you use to get your luggage out of the airport. In America, that costs $5. In Europe, Asia and Africa, all of which I visited in the past two years, those are free - and supported by advertising on said carts. "Sorry, we're fresh out of money in America because all the war and shit over the past 10 years", reads the idea and fresh out of things like 'freedom' and 'liberty' too according to the press I read.

The New Yorker Magazine does a whole issue on the 10th anniversary of 9-11 and it's not exactly a love story - having a cigarette with a guy who works stocking coolers at one of the restaurants in San Francisco's airports he says, "Do you think they really killed Bin Laden?" He doesn't believe it. The New York Times Sunday Book Review features a story by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum called, "That Used To Be Us" on America's slumping economy and lack of current innovation. 10 years of war are killing something, obviously. Obama is chided for curating George Bush's legacy by OpEdNews.com and it's pretty damn tough to find any optimism at all on the way into America. Excellent time to go back methinks.

You might find the Europeans grousing about Greece and the Asians grousing about, well nothing, but it's more than plain to see that at least the American intelligentsia are none too happy about much at all. As far as I'm concerned, I have nowhere to go but up. It will be interesting to see how that can come to be in a nation that seems to be wallowing in being down.

Pentagon Papers Released: America Reacts! - WWED Reporting for the Morton Report

40 years after the New York Times leaked portions of the document, all 7000 pages, enough to put the entire country to sleep, have finally been released. Read all about it here at TMR.

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Eat Pray Sleep: Thoughts on the movie and my own memoir

Eat Pray Love, the absolutely non-epic journey of author Elizabeth Gilbert's, publisher advanced funded journey through the supposed ravages of a divorce from a marriage that didn't seem so bad at all, makes you wonder if the privileged class of writers in New York just maybe expects a little too much out of life. The book was recommended to me over two years ago by a very good friend who had read the beginnings of my memoir, Wild Wild East, in hopes that I would see something in this 'chic-lit' or 'priv-lit' that would help me see my own work a little better. It did. But unfortunately I had to sit through a Julia Roberts at 43 film that depicts Gilbert at 32 that never reaches the literary heights described by Jennifer Egan of The New York Times as, "fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible" As Roberts' films go, there was a whole lot more of that attitude in Pretty Woman. Whatever wit there might have been in the book, it was clearly swept away by the incredibly inept screenwriting team, and thereby the acting to a truly flaccid script. In the film, Julia Roberts plays a scene in India where she has been sworn to silence in the ashram and it speaks more to her predicament than all the lines given to her by the script assistants on set. (Ms. Roberts, too-old-for-the-role performance reminded me of Jodie Foster falling over the hill in the dreadful, 'Anna and the King' (ie: The King and I)

An already successful writer divorces a not-so-bad-but-maybe-not-so-inspiring husband, takes up with a less-than-inspiring actor, then bolts her whole dreadful existence - and it is dreadful (travel writing assignments in Bali with unlimited mini-bar privileges - oooooooooooh!), to go around the world to truly commercial places that only rich white people go to and find herself? Give anyone an advance from Viking to a paid personal odyssey, a 157 week New York Times Bestseller book release and the cash from selling the screen rights to two more reasonably inept screen writers and I think they can find themselves. After this, maybe Gilbert will take a page from John Irving and take her own screenwriting into her own hands next time.

As for my writing and reflection on this tale, coupled with recommendations that I refer to Susan Jane Gilman's 'Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven' and James Sullivan's 'Over the Moat' as examples of the expat cannon of adventures, I know now that my tome needs to be better written, have more genuine insights and end with a discovery that is much more than cursory in the exploits of white people who leave the US to find themselves in other places. Good luck to me. I'm working on that, because as my publishing coach, Robin has said, "There is hope";

Personal Branding is Not About You Saying Good Shit About You

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to me

show details 9:48 PM (1 hour ago)

Peggy likes Peggy McColl - New York Times Best Selling Author & Online Marketing Expert on Facebook and suggests you like it too.

Peggy says, "Would love it if you would join my page. With gratitude, Peg".

With the best of luck, and articulate execution, Personal Branding is about other people saying good shit about you. You can help it along, but the above is no way to do that. There's nothing worse than blowing your own horn. The best Personal Branding simply sets it up for other people to blow your horn for you. A few weeks ago the Wild Wild East Dailies was picked up by the Wall Street Journal. How did I do that? And the answer is, that I don't know - but through years of writing, years of syndicating and publishing, it happened. And it happened for a reason.

The best Personal Branding simply sets things up. It doesn't push. It doesn't convert. It simply attracts - organically.

Bright Lights, Big Internet & the WWED

Thanks to Freya for this story from the New York Times, "Bright Lights, Big Internet" by Bill Wasik. It's dead on and we're all living it. Click on any paragraph and see the whole story.

THIS summer, as in so many summers gone by, young aspirants to the creative class — would-be writers, musicians, artists, editors, comedians, performers, thinkers, provocateurs — are stepping off buses in Port Authority and trains in Penn Station, navigating their rented trucks and borrowed cars through outer-borough blocks. These new arrivals come to New York, first and foremost, to find one another, a flock of other young people like themselves. But they come also to seek success, to chase their “big break,” that vague but real moment when, as if by magic, one suddenly finds oneself on the opposite side of the glass from one’s nose print. Is New York still worth the trip?

Meanwhile, another destination beckons, a place that courses with all the raw ambition and creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New York. I am referring, of course, to the Internet, which over the past decade has slowly become the de facto heart of American culture: the public space in which our most influential conversations transpire, in which our new celebrities are discovered and touted, in which fans are won and careers made.

Every month more YouTube sensations emerge, more bloggers ink big book deals, more bands blow up through music Web sites and MySpace, and every day more young people seek their “big break” in the virtual megalopolis rather than in (or as well as in) the physical one.

And then there is the Wild Wild East Dailies. Listing, hoping, grieving, smiling, wishing, hoping, praying, delaying and writing again. The path to Infinite Wisdom is long but at least I'm on it. It's all about the trip you know. Destinations rarely matter.

For more on digital marketing and social networking see:

Xing vs. LinkedIn: Round II
Trial and Error: The New Normal
What's Wrong With My Social Networking? Xing vs. LinkedIn I
Low Tech Germany. Who Knew?
Advertising People and Blogs
How to Write the Best Blog in the World
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If Blogs Are Free Does That Make Them Worthless?
Detri-Viral Marketing II: The Top 10 Social Media Blunders
Bright Lights, Big Internet and the WWED
Saigon Digital Marketing Conference Successfully Avoids Plumbers Convention
A Tale of Many Marketing Conferences
Detri-Viral Marketing I: How Web 2.0 Can Go Against A Brand
Marketing Predictions for 2009
Barcamp Saigon 2008
"Ignore Everybody" is Born: A Plug for Hugh MacLeod
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market? Asia has Risen,
Into the Gapinvoid - Web 2.0 Social Networking Born 20 Years Ago

Vietnam's BIG SHOW: Smaller and Digitally Challenged

Welcome to Vietnam's BIG SHOW website. Yup, this is it, or as close as you're going to get to it. Because, as of this writing, they don't have one - and they apparently agree with the Vietnam Advertising Association on at least one thing: "With 23.4% of global advertising budgets spent online, according to ZenithOptimedia, we're just going to ignore that and live in the past without even posting a website of our own or having a digital category in our show". That's about as smart as hosting a horseshoe making competition right down the street from Henry Ford's new factory would have been about 100 years ago, whilst ignoring the iron horses he'd been building in the starting gate. Well, I could be stretching the facts just a little, because the Vietnam Advertising Association decided not to have a show at all this year, so who knows if they would have even acknowledged digital - but they did last year and it's a shame they didn't lick their wounds after a pretty big mess and come back to the ring this year. The lack of competition seems to have neutered the BIG SHOW substantially from last year's Golden Bell face-off and now it's just the SMALL CRAMMED-INTO-AN-ALLEY SHOW.

Note: Since the writing of this post the BIG SHOW has posted a website of all the winners. Check it out - it is quite good.

My comments here will focus on the venue, work, participants and results, which pretty much encapsulates the purpose of any show so let's get started.

The venue:

Continuing with my digital whinge plank, go ahead and put "Cage Bar Vietnam" "Cage Quing Bar Vietnam Ho Chi Minh City" or anything else involving the name and location of this club into Google, Facebook, or even Dia Diem, the Vietnamese map site and see what you get. Unless you're a better surfer than I am (and I doubt that) you get squat, nada, nothing & zip. I certainly couldn't find a website, because I'm sure the Creative Circle Facebook page would have referenced one in their event notice if they did. So, bad on Cage Bar for not even having a website. Isn't there some lounge/trance/world/hip-hop requirement for street-cred that every club have at least a shitty website. Wait, that law was passed globally in 2000. Major fail Cage. I spent an hour trying to figure out where this place was before I left the house. Readers who arrived at this story from the New York Times review of Cage, might want to check out my "Your Man in Saigon" post after reading the next paragraph for a Brian McNally update.

Arriving at 3A Ton Duc Thang is at least an interesting experience, for there is certainly no signage that proclaims anything like a Cage Bar or a Quing Bar on that corner. If fact, even having found the place, there is still no English signage but maybe that's part of the underground image they're going for. Follow the crowd. That's where the hip people are going. Once into the mass of people crowded into an alley aside and behind the place I made my way for the entrance to the club proper. Accosted for my name card by attractive but less than convivial ladies I was given prompt entrance to the interior - jam packed to four walls with people in anticipation of the video screening. Air conditioning was conspicuously absent as the screening began but as true ad-geeks do, the crowd bludgeoned through in search of a picture, an idea, a quick laugh or just a break from the everyday rock-pile that so much ad-work has become. And they were not disappointed. Hot and maybe bleedingly uncomfortable at the mercy of cheap-Charlie club owners who couldn't spare a little air-con, the crowd looked upwards towards the screen.

The work:

The reel begins with a hopelessly dated StarWars typographic theme that should be illegal in 2008 (yes, I know it's a theme choice in iMovie but that doesn't mean we should use it) and segues into a beer campaign that makes the Vietnamese chuckle but the English subtitles don't do much to explain to the rest of us what is funny. Some nuance lost in translation for sure. Quite possibly the funniest spot of the evening for Creamfills chocolates, shows a mum and dad engaged in a Michael Douglas /Jeanne Tripplehorn/Fatal Attraction slam-her-up-against-the-wall make-out scene after just one chocolate, followed by a series of Vinamilk, Nivea, Suziki, Dutch Lady and Sony spots that prove nothing more than the idea that having a big logo or budget doesn't guarantee any sort of genius. The thick air is broken momentarily by a marshal arts cum Bruce/Jet/Lee/Li fight scene revolving around a puddle of mud that becomes a pretty simple and entertaining idea for Tide detergent. A PSA for kids wearing motorbike helmets is well done and well received as well as a Go Green effort by Toyota. But my favorite, and I think world groundbreaking spot of the evening, goes to Absolute Vodka in a series of black on white line illustration animations that follow two unmarked bottles as they travel though a world full of humans. When they stop at the bar for a drink, the items put before them bear a human shape and when the bottles drink them, the animation angle rises and hovers to birds-eye view so that we see the bottles full of teeming human lifeforms. The tagline says something about an "Absolute world" playing on the inverted idea of the bottles maintaining human lives - and I just thought it was damn fucking brilliant. Yes, it sounds, and indeed is obtuse, but it was the brightest damn idea of the whole show and better go on to Cannes and other international shows as a real show pony for Absolute. For their interest in the spot, the Viets didn't really seem to get it in the end, but I credit that to their unfamiliarity with the bottle shape and name of the Absolute brand - however famous it may be in western markets it is a relatively new product here, so a lot of the imagery and branding did not translate immediately here. Kudos to TBWA for that work.

For the print work, most of it would have made good wallpaper for a baby's room. You could fall asleep in seconds with the greater lot of it. My few highlights included an activation campaign for Listerine mouthwash that replaced the actual bottle labels with clever headlines about gossip, kissing and the things one does with their mouth that might be better accomplished with fresh breath and another sort of viral idea for Tropicana Twister that put giant orange slice appliqués on revolving doors to simulate the twisting of real fruit into a refreshing drink. Conversely, another drink campaign made the drinkers mouths morph into the shapes of odd premiums like computers and iPods to accomplish being possibly one of the most unappetizing series of images for a product you drink that I have ever seen. Wrapping up the work, Leo Burnett takes the art direction award for a charming and clever image of an office move that comes out of and lives happily in left field and another agency, who I can only identify by the number of letters in their name (8), wasted two perfectly good display panels with work that wouldn't have made it into an even a half-rate student show. Next year, we should pay agencies $200 not to show stuff like they did.

The participants:

The BIG SHOW is an excellent show, and the only real showcase communications people in Vietnam have to see, discuss, share and debate work during the whole year - but it's in dangerous need of a serious updating and reflection of what the market really is - before it becomes THE BIG FOREIGN AGENCY'S ANALOG ADVERTISING SHOW. The conspicuous lack of Vietnamese agencies at the show was glaring and the lack of any digital component at all was not only professionally embarrassing but irresponsible as well. I don't want to go on record as the first guy who said this, lest Martin Sorrell bar me forever from his consciousness, but with the Olympics over, American elections finalised and a string of ever-going financial bailouts and corporate failures affecting all sorts of budgets worldwide, waiting to see 2009's jump in online spending at the expense of traditional medias will have seemed positively academic by next year's end. Having witnessed the youth, energy and outright multi-cultural optimism of the digital creative communications camp a few weeks ago at BarCampSaigon and comparing that to the rather old-school, foreign-centric effort exhibited in this year's BIG SHOW, two not so epiphanous suggestions come to mind: Get digital - for the future of the business- there's a whole community of people making great digital work. And get Vietnamese - for the involvement of the whole agency community. I really do believe doing both of those things will benefit the entire industry in a way that we're not realising currently.

The result:

As I have seen the past three years in Vietnam, the BIG SHOW always serves the most important function of providing a meet, greet and glower or grouse over what may or may not be the best work in country - but sadly, just once a year. What happens so nicely, annually, doesn't ever seem to replicate itself throughout the year, in a way that could so obviously benefit the young minds that propel the business forward. I'd be happy to work on some quarterly, more youth oriented, information based gatherings (yes, libations included!) that would carry the spirit of the show more regularly into the working lives of those who do the work. This is an area of discussion already open amongst a few of us in the biz so if you have ideas, or want to donate beer, you know where to find me - let me know. Finally two slaps on the wrist tonight: #1: Budweiser - for only providing an hour's worth of free beer - Tiger was much more generous previously. #2: The Cage - for not having the air-con on during the indoor portion and then not doing a thing to convert a more than willing crowd into an after hours crowd who would have happily danced and drunk more had they been provided specials, decent music or any encouragement at all.

Finis:

So that's the BIG SHOW 2008. Not the best show, but the best show we've got. Making it better is up to all of us.

(Of Note: A press release dated one day after this post went up on IntellAsia.net, December 6th, announcing a digital version of The BIG SHOW to be launched in mid-December. Good.)



POSTSCRIPT: As a personal observation I could easily be taken to task for criticizing the show whilst having nothing in it and in some form that's absolutely true - but in another form, not true at all. For those of you who know me and this blog, I write dutifully, three posts a week, and cover the Vietnam advertising scene whenever a story of note comes up,. In 10 months this blog has become one of the most read in country and is also gathering a significant following worldwide. So, in essence I do have a product, it just happens to be a digital product, a social media product, that the BIG SHOW, or any other aspiring communications show in Vietnam needs to account for. But tonight I had one of the nicest things a blog writer could ask for happen. Tonight I met a reader.

I didn't know Phoung at all before this evening. We met whilst I was discussing the sudden drought of Budweiser with her husband-to-be. Upon exchanging the requisite name cards she exclaimed that she new me from Facebook. "Sure", I said. "I'm on Facebook". "But you write the blog", she said. And with that I was immediately taken aback. Who's to know who actually reads a person's blog. For all the accountability and transparency promised by the digital world, it's still rare to find out who those people really are who read the drivel one scribbles every week. And I'm quite the scribbler, I am. So much so that few, worldwide, are really able to keep up with the volume I produce on a weekly basis. Phoung went on to describe minute parts of this work that stretched back as far as 9 months - she said some things were funny - she said the work was graphically well designed - and she went on. Her husband-to-be-jumped in and said, "David, for all the time I have known her, she has never complimented anyone's work as much as she is right now. She's not easily impressed, David. I can assure you she is not giving you a load of crap." Phoung and I continued to speak. She works for a design firm. I was humbled and more than interested in the idea that a second language speaker could have actually made much sense of what I have been writing about for the past 10 months. This work is certainly not easy for people who speak and read English and a real mountain climb for a person dealing through two languages. She explained to me, and her fiancé confirmed, that she sits with a dictionary to get through one of my standard posts. This to me is all pretty damn amazing. And probably the number one reason I continue to engage in this project. One more person read it. One more person got it. And one more person liked it. And that's enough.That should be enough for any writer. Thank you Phoung.

To know more about Brand Marketing Training in Vietnam, go here <.

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Fold-in World!

It's impossible to know when I first fell in love with Mad Magazine but the love affair has never ended. Even a year ago when a friend was coming to visit Vietnam from the States and asked me if there was anything I wanted, very high on my list was a copy of Mad. Throughout my teens, and well into adulthood, the art, wry humour and not-so-subtle satire of the thing has been always the ticket. As a kid, it taught us that one need not take the whole world so damn seriously, and that even political subject matter could be funny. Remember, we were growing up in the middle of the Vietnam War and that was a war that needed the edge taken off it for those of us who would soon be nearing draft age.


Upon graduating university, having been the first year of American youth not to have participated in the draft, I entered the advertising business. And within two years, had a budget that allowed me to hire Jack Davis, one of the cartoonists, to do an illustration for a client of mine. Somewhere, buried deep in a box, I still have the brown paper wrapper the illustration came mailed to me in with my name written in Davis' signature style by he himself. So cool. My name written by one of my idols.



Later I coerced my wife into attending a Halloween party as Spy vs Spy, with she as the white Spy and myself as the black. We did manage a Best Costume award for that but I am convinced it was the true reason for her divorce filing, after spending some time with a therapist and thinking it may have negatively affected her self-esteem. But through it all I've remained a fan. If anything, the magazine has lasted much longer than the marriage.

So now through maybe the most unlikely of sources, The New York Times, comes a web 2.0 version of Mad's famous rear cover fold-ins. A fabulous killer-app that allows you to digitally fold the covers in and see the resulting punch-lines and images. Al Jaffee, the original creator is still at large at the age of 87 and he hasn't lost a lick of wit.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear and give the big NYT a click. It'll be well worth the 15 or 20 minutes you waste and you probably already have one of those spreadsheet decoy screens you can implement should the boss saunter by.

Happy folding!

I'm A Crack Addicted Underwater Basket-weaving Aborginal Holocaust Survivor And Now A Best-Selling New York Times Author!

"Meet Margaret Seltzer, pen name Margaret Jones, who until this week was a half-white, half-Indian gangland drug runner who grew up a foster child in predominately black South Central Los Angeles. Her memoir was hailed as a "raw... remarkable book" in the Times, won her tentative online admirers and became the 28th best selling memoir on Amazon after it was released Friday. Of course Seltzer basically made her whole "memoir" up, being entirely white, having grown up in the predominately white San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles, having gone to a fancy private school and having been raised by her biological family. Her book tour was supposed to start today in Eugene, Oregon but her publisher, a division of Penguin Group, has canceled all that and recalled her books. How did she get caught? Her lies worked too well: Seltzer's adulatory press was her unraveling. After a profile last week in the House & Home section of the Times, Jones' older sister called her publisher to rat her out." – You can read the whole sordid affair on Gawker.

Seeing this whole business, and having a book myself in the works, set the wheels a spinning in that little devious mind of mine. I riffled through the stack of rejection letters, poured over my frustration with agents and editors incapable of using simple email or fearing attachments because they're still on Windows 95 and decided to do a little guerilla work myself.

I spent a few hours compiling a short-list of those agents whom I had heard nothing from in response to my query letters of last year and sent the following brief note:

"Maybe publishers are now ready for a real memoir."

No preface. No mention of the above story. I didn't have to. Every agent and editor was busy at their respective water cooler wondering who was going to take a beating for this debacle and waiting for axes to fall.

And guess what? I got two requests for proposals from agents on both coasts. Fucking amazing. They didn't even know what my book was about. And maybe reality TV has finally taken it's toll.

Both new agents are still technologically Flinstonian and think that mailing large reams of paper, through communists censors, in a third-world country is a cheap walk in the park, but, I'm making progress. Or at least as much progress as one can make, dealing with an arcane industry that hasn't seen what the music business has done to itself in the last 10 years.

Two more agents on the hunt! Maybe I can sell the ones I don't pick on Ebay later.

Wild Wild East. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.