Welcome to the Third World

I'm in the Philippines, possibly the only country in the known universe where Friendster and Y! Messenger reign supreme amongst their industry peers.

Considering there's too much to process in the short space of time I'll be here (I arrived Thursday/Friday; leave Monday/Tuesday), I've done the natural thing and fallen back on the areas in which I can easily recognize disparity: the internet and advertising.

Right now I'm in an internet cafe that's been set up in someone's hallway. (Gotta love old-school XP and Mozilla Firefox pre-tabbing.) Besides this spot, there's no internet anywhere else I've seen - not even a closed connection I can mooch off of on the long lonely nights. People communicate mainly via text-message. The mobile industry is massive here, and texting takes on political importance. When elections hit, everybody's deluged by "personal" messages from presidential incumbents.

To think back home, the only "celebrity" to ever mobile message me was Sam L. Jackson. And that was considered a forward thinking marketing campaign for the so-called new wave "third screen." Puh-lease.

And the ads? What fun. A vivid example: I logged onto Xanga today, and the central banner ad on the homepage was for a "matrimonial assistance" service called Shaadi.com.

Women are the Philippines' biggest export. They depart the country as domestic helpers, mail order brides and -- for the lucky ones -- nurses. For this reason, all my island-bound cousins are studying nursing. It appears to be the easiest way for an educated person to leave the country.

For those who seek glamour in the profession, it's soothing to know that HappySlip -- who's practically a local celebrity amongst rabid YouTubers in Quezon City -- pays for her vlogging habit with a nursing degree. (Everyone here loves you, Christine!)

The long car ride from Manila to Quezon is colored with billboards that pretty much obscure the landscape. Open space is fast paved-over with high-rise condominiums by a company that calls itself "truly Filipino." The fruit of its productivity are virtually indistinguishable from homes I've seen in El Cerrito or Walnut Creek.

The most expensive cafes and restaurants boast European or American origin, though I have never heard of any of them.

As for the jeepneys, most are airbrushed over with religious messages in graffiti-style print. Refurbished army vehicles, now posing as buses, marked "GOD IS GOOD" or "Nothing is impossible with God" whiz topsy-turvy around kids playing basketball on the street. "How's my driving?" some bumpers ask -- a question immediately followed by a number too long for my brain to process.

It's odd to think this is where my parents came from. "Welcome to the Third World," my aunt said playfully.

This happened shortly after I asked her why the public toilet we were standing in didn't have flushers. "And what's that bucket of water for?" I added. She sure got a kick out of me.

The Lowest Common Denominator

I think the most groundbreaking thing about internet advertising is that it has made everything trackable: how users surf, where they go, how much time they spend on a site, what they ultimately buy, even what they're looking for at outset.

And because everything is trackable, ads are better tailored to consumers. This is what made Google AdSense so attractive to so many. This is what made behavioral tracking so frightening to those who prefer the illusion of anonymity.

The promise behind the Semantic Web ("Web 3.0") is of a universe that caters entirely to us. Anything with a chip or an agnostic barcode will be internet-ready or readable, and anything internet-ready should be able to serve us what we seek at any given moment.

But will it give me what I really, really want? Will it give me more me?

On Driving an Axe Through 'the Next Step'

We learned in college that the "teenager" is an invention of the early 20th century -- the Hallmark holiday of social development, if you will.

Considering teenhood is something we take for granted and chock off to biology, wrapping my mind around its artifice is an amazing mental leap. And yet in the the last handful of years, we actually got to witness the process by which marketers do, in fact, create, label and adorn a proud new developmental segment: the tween (formerly known as the pre-teen).

The other night I was having this moody quarterlife funk and it occurred to me that "adulthood" is probably as much a construction as teen and tweenhood.

It's more opaque, granted, because you can't really give it a beginning and end (13-19 or 8-12). And because of that, I have this abiding worry that unless we realize there's no placeholder for "adulthood" because there is no adulthood, most of us are going to be groping blindly for it for a very long time.

That's too bad, because so many of us need adulthood to exist so badly: Once you've taken all the prescribed steps -- pre-school, gradeschool, puberty, college -- and are launched out into that wide, wide world, onto what safe ground can you measure your next move?

We fall back on marketing, media and pop culture, which generously distributes guidelines grafted onto us in part by our institutions.

College taught us how to watch the news, question religion, suspect authority figures and have existential conversation. But jobs teach you that's kid shit. Life's about being jaded.

With time, and in the exact same way you and your ilk learned how to smoke pot, date and fuck, you will learn how to hate your inevitable office life, that you'll eventually lose count of your sexual partners (and it will be okay!), that you'll get cheated on or will cheat. You'll get married, have kids, suffer from a midlife crisis and buy too many cars. You'll divorce and go on some tortured quest for your high school sweetheart.

Maybe you'll find religion again. Or better yet, go to grad school.

Bills are inevitable, friends are few, and to unwind, everybody goes drinking on Friday. You'll make cliched statements: I've never felt this way in my life. I want to have your baby. Please love me.

And amidst all of this, every once in awhile, that question without an answer will surface in your mind: Is this adulthood?

Sometimes it'll come out as a statement: Behave like an adult!

Inanely: I'm a grown-ass man.

Or in a more childlike way, amid defeat: Grown-ups don't do this to each other.

On a quest for secure ground where there really isn't any, my generation has found a convenient shelf, courtesy of your local marketer: We're Quarterlifers. And we're having a crisis. Our debts are high, we're going home to mom and dad, no job is good enough for us, and we've been victimized by the murky indefiniteness of "adulthood."

According to the associated data, we'll be here from age 21 to age 29 -- after which we can coast safely into mid-life, a world we understand because, like teenhood, it has been so lovingly documented for us.

How hard would it be to say fuck all of this?

It is surprisingly much harder to leave a world safely accorded us by pop culture than any of us is willing to believe. And that's too bad. Maybe if we admitted we're addicted to a constellation of spoonfed -- occasionally bleak or beautiful -- images, we could learn to pick and choose which ones we actually want to live out and which ones to relegate to the heap.

And amidst all that personal sifting, perhaps then we could do the truly impossible -- indeed, that very antithesis of early adulthood: locate what makes us happy, and do it bravely, and do it now instead of seeking a prescribed "next step" that will earn nods of approval all around. (Granted, playing the martyr is also something we've learned along the way.)

But oh, many of us won't allow ourselves to shake all this off until after the long struggle toward retirement. Sagacity is part of the blueprint, but only near the end.

The Confidence Game

While promise has legs, only talent has hands.

- Paco de Lucia

In February or March I was standing around in the break room at my old job, burning a hole in a big tin cookie jar, when Deanna, one of the co-creative directors, walked in.

"Hi, Angela. Is everything okay?" she said.

Deanna is nice and I have always liked her. But I didn't really want to go into specifics about why I was standing in the break room eating butter cookie after butter cookie while scowling at the Formica, so I said something along the lines of, "Deanna, I'm really sensitive."

She stared for awhile as though trying to work me out. Then,

"Is this personal or work-related?"

"Work." I can't remember what was irking me so much. It could have been any number of things: a recent fight with the COO, an angry client, an unreasonable (or all too reasonable) blog comment...

Deanna tilted her head and kept staring. It's possible that I stopped eating cookies at this point. It's hard to say.

"You know," she began slowly, "it's hard to be young and have a lot of responsibilities at work."

"Uh huh," I said. This was somewhat flattering and I was already starting to cheer up. God, I'm such a sucker.

"But," she continued, just as slowly, "you get to a point."

"What kind of a point?"

"You get to a point where it doesn't matter what other people say and what other people think of you, because you know what you can do, and you're confident in your skill."

"When did you get there?" I said, pressing insufferably even though I could feel us veering into Wonder Years territory.

Deanna smiled in a manner most motherly. "I think I was in my 30s," she said.

That seemed like a very long wait.

She started walking off. "If you want to talk about it more, come by my desk," she added. She stopped to hug me, then left me alone with the cookies and the godforsaken coffee, which was burning in its gurgly machine.

I have thought about that conversation a lot since then. Reading Chuck Klosterman's IV added to the discourse inside my head. There's a kind of arrogance you possess when you're young and bright. The arrogance isn't quite made up of confidence; it's made more of a desperate desire to prove to everybody you meet that you're somebody.

It's another telltale sign that you haven't yet become confident in your skill.

How do you break out of that? How do you get confident in your hands and your head? How do you stop sucking on every word the critics and the flatterers say?

Do you have to wait for it, like puberty?

On the Meaning of Occupation

"Should men and women, after all, be defined in any important way by their work? The answer, of course, is yes, otherwise the activities that largely support our lives and consume our time would be unfriendly, foreign, and irrelevant to us.

"Our occupation should not be something we visit like the seashore in summer or a prisoner in a prison, despite the fact that the work may be unpleasant [...] Even if it is like speaking a foreign language we haven't learned, that incapacity itself is totally defining."

-Foreword by William Gass, Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser

The Medium is (Integral to) the Message

I hit NYC for the first time last weekend. Once I got over the elaborate spiderweb that passes for a subway (definitely a far cry from beloved BART), I fell all over myself.

New York is the living, breathing witness to America's industrialized history, stuffed to overflowing with contradictory messages and too many dreams. And like a splatter in the concrete, every once in awhile you find beauty again.

I'm accosted by ads I've reviewed, come to vivid life. It's like they were lying in wait and have leaped out to confront me, pulsing with energy and so much force. The press releases that tried to contain them simply never had a chance.

Since the awakening, so to speak, I've developed an almost superstitious aversion to PDFs. Generally speaking I don't mind them, but in the strange universe of ad critique I find them deceptive for two reasons:

1. Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. Can you divorce the medium from the message? No. In PDF form, the ad lacks the impact and gravity its creators had in mind.
   
2. Press releases, which also come in PDFs, are like cheat-sheets. PR execs and agencies love to wax creative about ad particulars on a release. The problem is, your consumer doesn't get one. He or she has no chance of knowing why you picked that color, or why the giant talking tooth made a great inside joke. Fuck poetic license in a PR; it's supposed to be in your AD! (Have I mentioned I also hate reading them?)

I'd like to gauge the quality of an advertisement in almost the same way an art critic appraises some ancient or contemporary oeuvre.

It needs to be in front of me, larger than life, involved in my world. If it's a billboard, I want to be standing under it with my neck craned as far as it will go, trying to decide if it "pops."

If it's a print ad, I want to encounter it in a magazine or discover it hanging above me one drowsy day on the train. If it's a :30 spot, I want to find it appropriately adorning some TV show while I sit fooling with a Rubik's cube on the couch.

A version of an ad in a PDF, versus the one you come across on the street, is like the difference between a 20-foot Picasso and a JPEG, or the Louvre's Mona Lisa and a postcard.

You can never learn how your advertising moves a person - provided it does at all - until you can experience it in the intended format, whether it's hundreds of feet above you on a billboard, or posing as a coquettish interactive Flash corner on the digital edition of BusinessWeek.

There's simply no comparison.

RIAA: Still Suing Kids? Get Over It Already

I'm loath to elaborate on the goings-on of the diversity conference for a second time, considering I covered the main points on Adrants the next day. But there is something I didn't mention simply because there was no graceful way to include it without making the write-up sound awkward and unfocused.

During his keynote Larry brought up the Youtube copyright situation and flabbergastedly cried, "Everybody's still trying to own stuff. Owning stuff is over." (Not quoted to scale.)

To explain, he noted that information is digital, totally fluid. What can you do in the face of a flood, raise a hand and say stop? Fluid has an amazing capacity to get around you and even through you if necessary.

Tough luck for those whose professions revolved around licensing content and distribution rights. But hey, it forces us to find different ways to make money and improve upon the landscape of communication altogether. I don't have a problem with that. Growth is tough but not without its rewards. (One such reward: evading death - or worse, complete obsolescence - a wee while longer.)

All right. It's nearing 2 AM. Sleep: FTW.

Kaiser is the Devil, Ads are His Bait

Contrary to popular conception, I'm not the super-sexy, hyper-awesome, ad-livid hard-ass I make myself out to be. (I'm sure this goes against everything you've seen and heard.)

At heart I'm an impressionable consumer. A consistent campaign, or a sense of shared values, makes a big impact on how I feel about brands in the arena.

Ever since I was a kid I've had negative feelings about Kaiser. My parents plainly avoided them. And while their preferences about healthcare providers aren't topics one cares much about as a kid, one does inherit the prejudices. I admit I brought the bad vibes with me in my journey through time.

In the last year I began to re-examine those feelings. While I'd like to say it's because I've grown more mature and reflective about everything around me, that simply wouldn't be true.

The reason is its "Thrive" campaign, whose billboards are everywhere I go - mostly on BART, greeting me at the very beginning and end of my workday.

I like it. As a Responsible Adult In-the-Make, I feel it reflects many core values. Sweetness, purity and an underlying promotion of inner well-being just oozes out of the simple-things imagery.

So when I found out my company chose Kaiser as our healthcare provider, I was stoked. I felt I was embarking on an adventure. KAISER! I'm ready to fall into your clean clinical arms, nodding vigorously at any concerned assessments you'll (doubtless, thoughtfully) make.

Recently my whole body rebelled. I thought it was the flu but my parents, deathly concerned, conveyed me to the big pretty medical center Kaiser keeps near my home.

The first thing Kaiser did was hit me with a massive co-pay. That was cool, I could roll, the big guys cost more, I get it. Some girls brought me into the doctor's office and took my temperature.

"You're at 108," one said, tsk-tsking. I could believe it, I was not feeling cool.

After a few moments I heard jokes and loud laughter outside my door, then the doctor walked in. She couldn't have been much older than me. She looked at me, grinned, asked what my symptoms were, and feigned concern at my response. She seemed to be on the verge of giggles the whole time.

Finally she said, "I doubt you have it but I'm going to have you X-rayed for pneumonia. Head down to the basement."

I was appalled. I could hardly stand! Worse still, the basement was in another building on the other side of campus, where I was hit with another co-pay. And when I returned from the X-ray (all stumbly and shit), I was locked out.

This sucked.

A janitor eventually walked by and let me in with her spare keys. By then I was exhausted. I stumbled into the doctor's office, panting dramatically, world spinning, and collapsed across the counter. She walked in, burst out laughing and cried, "What's wrong with you?" Then she prescribed drugs for sinusitis and sent me on my way.

My parents, tight-lipped, spoonfed me back to life over the next few days. "We told you," they said about 67,000 times, shaking their heads and glaring. "We told you about Kaiser. Didn't we? Ever since you were small."

Ugh.

Great marketing that belies a horrible product or service is just as bad as lazy marketing. In fact, one could argue it probably hurts a company more over the long-term.

An awesome prospective ad for Kaiser:

A tower of made of splintered toothpicks, shooting high into the sky with the tagline: "We may not do our job, but we're pretty damn big, yo. Kaiser Permanente. Even inexpicably, thrive."

It's Just Culture, Man.

If you talk to maybe most any first-gen Southeast Asian, what you'll find is that rice is a big deal. No. It's not just a staple; it's a really big deal. There are songs about it.

I concluded yesterday that Filipinos in particular are weird about rice. I don't excuse myself from that statement. When I first tasted rice outside my parents' house, I was appalled by its strange consistency. The rice I grew up with is stubby, and not quite sticky but sticky enough to squeeze into airtight balls if you like to eat with your fingers.

It took some time to learn that rice has many faces, only one of which I came to know intimately - the kind that comes with the little red medal. The use of the red medal is actually a splendid sales tactic, considering I'd push my otherwise indifferent parents to patronize whatever brand it was so I could tear the medal off the rice bag for use in various games of pretend, like pinning it to the clothes of Angela the Olympic Winner or attaching it to very valuable wills for discovery by Angela the Sexy Spy. Don't ask when.

But I digress. For the last few weeks I've been working with a new marketing trainee that I happen to know really well. In fact, together we wiled away our Fil-Am centric youths battling imaginary foes in swamp-side Vallejo.

Yesterday I took him to an Indian restaurant and he sat staring at his rice for over 10 minutes because it was so long and dry. "Where do they find it?" he asked, perplexed. He didn't look up at me the whole time.

"India," I answered. This was probably not the best or most accurate answer but under the circumstances it did neither harm nor good.

He picked at it. "They put spices in here," he observed softly. "There's ... a flavour."

"It is good with yogurt," I said mechanically. At that point I disengaged myself from the conversation and began eating my curry. I wish I'd known that hours later I'd again be condemned to more rice-talk.

Me to my parents as I dug through the rice cooker, less than 4 hours later: "Dude. Why do you guys make rice that's half brown and half white?"

Mom: "What do you mean?"

Me, teasing: "It's, like, both brown and white. Can you not make up your minds?"

Mom started to laugh. "We have to mix so your daddy will eat it," she said. "This way at least it's still half-healthy."

I carried my rice-laden plate to the kitchen table, where my pops gave me that smug look and said, "See, Angel, if it's all brown, it's ..." He seemed to be at a loss. "Terrible."

"Terrible? Is that the best you can do?" I said. Really. He's normally devastating on the rapier-wit scale. It's a point of pride, even. Possibly the rice thing draws less-than-rational sentiments.

He started to laugh. "You have to put some white in so it's edible," he replied finally.

I didn't pursue this realm of logic further. But today at the office I mentioned the exchange to my trainee, sans ending, and he just looked at me strangely and said, "Half brown, half white? I bet that tastes hella good. Isn't it healthier too?"