These past couple of weeks I've been attending 2 talks and a workshop from asian advertising 'masters' (It's the name of the event, I don't actually think they call themselves masters). It cost a whopping RM290, which I thought was fairly reasonable but now that I've been to all the events, it seems like an exorbitant amount. The first talk lasted 2 and a half hours, and it was split into two parts with two different speakers, one Malaysian(?) and one Indonesian.
I'm not categorising them like that because of racism issues, but they have very VERY distinct accents and culture differences, which I'll get to in a minute. The talk was held in a cinema hall (fancy) and you can imagine how comfortable it was. In fact, it was TOO comfortable. It was the only one of these events where I actually fell asleep, albeit only for a minute. I mean, a pitch black theater, full back seats, cold air-conditioning and, to top it all off, a monotonous voice. It had better sleeping conditions than a five star hotel bed and cough syrup. The speakers are very experienced, and very creative with their ideas, but they couldn't communicate those ideas to us very well. They did have visual aid by way of video examples and progress pictures, which for the most part was what kept me awake. The second speaker, the Indonesian one, had a very thick Jakarta accent and I really had to struggle to understand him.
The second talk is still fresh in my mind since it was only yesterday. This speaker was a Korean guy, who started out on a VERY wrong foot with me simply because his talk, titled DIGITAL PLAYGROUND was also the title of his book. Conveniently on sale right now. The language barrier as well was very strong with him, which only became obvious towards the end of the talk where people asked him questions and he misunderstood every single one of those questions. For example, someone asked "These advertising solutions you gave were not very long-lasting, so how do you continue to fix the problem after the ad campaign is over?" which was a very good question. He replied "The client asked for a campaign and they only gave us a month, so after a month we removed the campaign." Slightly on topic, but honestly not really. Another question was quite specific, it was "How did the technology in that campaign work?", to which he replied "That was just a prototype, but I think it will catch on and start being used nationwide."
Anyway, today was the last one of these events, and it was a 7 hour workshop by the same Korean speaker from yesterday. He started with a thankfully brief talk which still lasted about an hour. Then he gave the whole class a brief, which was 'How to sell Smart Watch effectively without a shop?' Quoted verbatim. We were split into 9 groups of 4, and we had around 3 hours to complete our proposal and present it to a group of industry professionals and lecturers.
Our group played around with the idea of augmented reality,and the main problem to solve was obviously that people will not buy something they cannot actually see or try out themselves. Therefore, with the technology of augmented reality being so common nowadays, we came up with the idea of using magazines, flyers, or printouts as the 'vehicle' to deliver our paper smart watch to people. Then, on the smart watch website people can customise their own smart watch and it will appear (on screen) as though it is actually on your wrist. The user then goes through an interactive series of events as they go through a typical 'day' waking up, jogging, taking a shower, driving, etc. All while holding your wrist with the 'watch' facing the camera.
Interestingly, ours was the only group that did not make use of the QR code technology. The speaker's talk was FILLED with examples with QR codes, which is why everyone else were 'inspired'. I managed to do most of the presentation which surprised me, since normally I am terrible at public speaking. Our feedback was pretty positive though so that was nice.
Now on to some petty stuff, which is what you want to see anyway. The Korean speaker had the most stereotypical asian accent I have ever heard! I always thought they were exaggerated. You know, Ls and Rs, where Lazy becomes Razy, Role becomes Lore. Also his THs were pronounced like Ss, for example Sirsty instead of Thirsty.
To sum it all up, I don't regret it, but would I do it again if given the chance? Probably not.
6/10,
