Cadbury's Flop?

Apparently Cadbury seeded a video into cyberspace a week ago, hoping to attain some "cyber-contagion".

hit "proposal fail india" into Google and this is what pops up in 0.25seconds

Based on the comments found on the web, it's looking to be a flop more than anything else.

Shit just gets worse as DailyMail tries to write about it. I just see more and more angry netizens setting the viral video in flames, with some stamping it as "staged", "just trying to get hits on YouTube", and "fake". Dailymail has since stopped accepting comments for its article.

Kinda left a sour taste in my mouth. 

Not feeling Cadbury anymore. Perhaps a bar of Hersheys would be nice. 

"Advertising and Promotion" by Chris Hackley

Hidayah introduced "Advertising and Promotion" by Chris Hackley during Wednesday's studio consultation. 

Visited my polytechnic to check it up, and managed to find both first and second editions. Highly recommend the newly revised second edition, which includes e-marketing and the changing phase of modern day advertising — crucial to my FYP thesis research. 

Personally found this more useful than "The Advertising Concept Book". Rather part money for Hackley's instead of the other. 

Ancient Aliens and the Mystifying Histories of Mankind...

Totally off topic from my final year research...

I've always been madly intrigued by the history of mankind and the idea of God, religion, and our origins as humans. Though I'm amidst my Final Year Project, I still can't contain my constant interest in the existence of aliens, the idea and possibility of extra terrestrials being mistaken as gods and angels during ancient times, an explanation for all the impressive man-made structures made years "Before Christ" and the explanation for humans to develop vocal chords to create language in both written and spoken form. Everything is so mind boggling. So many "what if"s and schools of thought.

An article by The Washington Post, dated 9th March 2012, explains the possibility of Atheism outnumbering Christianity in a mere twenty years time. My immediate response, "Why not?"

I made a bizzare discovery during the holidays, reading up casually on "The Ideas That Made the Modern World"; During the Renaissance period, it was considered a terrible sin to be an atheist and not have a religious belief, it was so sinful that an atheist was thought to be equivalent to a Rapist and a Murderer for not having a belief in God. The reason so, a man without fear for God is a man who is capable of sins unimaginable to man.

It's a policy which I could understand, after all. Man needed an explanation for all things uncomprehendable, and the easiest way to do so is to define them as godly, and the miracles of god. God, back then, was the central figure to keep societies and communities in check. God was the fearful figure who punished the bad, and rewarded the good. The actions of man to do good and avoid evil doings was overseen by God. A God, or Gods, that could have been misinterpreted by ancient man who could not explain the miracles these technologically advanced extra-terrestrials have introduced to them and their communities.

I've always wondered if the invention of language, development of cities, introduction of time, strange ancient structures that depicted our position in the solar system was created not by man but by highly intelligent extra terrestrial beings...

Simply love these sort of mind boggling stuff.

Social Media — is it a social success?

I am starting to wonder how effective social media is in society.

I am divided, and yes a little bit confused.

Simply because, every time we have a moment of downtime, we head online and login into our various social media platforms. This is where, I feel, social media works well and hard to get messages out to the public. The simple "like" and "share" and "repost" button is so conveniently located, it takes someone no more than one second to share a photo, an event, or a comment. It is that easy.

But as I read on (particularly this book that I am currently sucked into "Contagious" by Jonah Berger), I cannot help but agree that social media make situations seem like publicity messages are going out effectively to the masses and generating a strong presence for brands, when in fact they aren't. The reason being that the general masses have now turned immune to social media because there is simply too much information shared on the internet that people have zoned out of it. Thus, not everything shared and liked on social media translates to an affirmative brand-building or message-spreading success. It could just be a false front.

This is where I am finding I am finding traditional methods of actual tangible physical interaction from brands with customers most reliable, along with the traditional word-of-mouth recommendation. As much as we are always connected on the internet, we spend a good three quater of the time offline. This suddenly brings to mind a personal situation that recently just occurred. I believe I have just conspired another string of word-of-mouth "advertising".

Just yesterday I bought a portable hard drive. My HDD needed to meet the following criteria:

Resonably Priced
Brand Reputation
Connectivity : USB 3.0, optional thunderbolt, and firewire
PC & MAC compatible (need to consider that I might have ancients still working on PC)


With all the factors stated above, my choices narrowed down to the following:

Toshiba — cheapest, but I have no clue about it's reputation in HDD
Seagate — ranking right in the middle, have heard about Seagate's reliability
Western Digital — most expensive, am currently using a desktop external HDD and am extremely satisfied with it
(strange unheard of Chinese brands were immediately crossed out of the list)

After much deliberation, I picked up the Seagate's portable plus back up.

A pretty decent choice, I thought, after all it's price was reasonable for a 500GB HDD, it gave me the option for a thunderbolt and firewire connectivity, and it's MAC and PC compatible.

I am now an officially proud owner of a sleek looking Seagate portable drive which I named Brains Jr. (because my grand 1TB desktop HDD is called Brains, this little one automatically adopted "Jr" into its title). I am so proud of "Brains Jr." until I found out the complimentary "Nero Cloud Storage" was only compatible for PC users. Immediately, I shared this unfortunate news with my boyfriend, asking him to keep clear of Seagate drives and stayed on-board with Western Digital HDD instead.

Bottom line: I am still satisfied and mildly happy with Brains Jr., and glad to have it on board my digital family but my happiness diluted when the complimentary feature was not made available to me a MAC user. I feel segregated and forgotten.

I, Lilia, have started a potential chain-message of "Seagate being MAC-unfriendly", which I hope isn't true and lied in the fault of me the consumer who didn't understand the product.

The power and unforgivable face of Word of Mouth advertising as said by an angry HDD owner.

Feeling stuck, overwhelmed by endless possibilities

I am feeling stuck at trying to arrive at a conclusion with my Thesis and Statement of Intent for my project. I think what is making it a little more challenging is my change in specialism. I am still trying to adapt from the fast-turn around Advertising Communication “pace of life” to Graphic Communication specialism.

It is this ability to explore endless possibilities in Graphic Communication, opening up so many doors to so many outcomes, that is overwhelming me right now. Unlike Advertising Communication, Graphic Communication allows such endless exploration.

I think what I’m looking at is this year’s Graphic Comm graduates' works to gain a sense of direction and inspiration.

 Wise words of Catbug to myself: Keep Calm and Throw a Blanket (on it).

 Shall try to keep calm, collect my thoughts, and carry on.

Jinsop Lee — Designing for All Five Senses

A classmate of mine, Lix, shared with me what she watched online.

"Jinsop Lee is an industrial designer who believes that great design appeals to all five senses." via TedTalk

Lee's approach to design was a savior; He has articulated what I have been having in mind. He mentioned that a good design looks great, yes — but shouldn't it also feel great, smell great and sound great too? True. With modern break through technology, it is not a dream impossible to achieve.

This gave birth to Lee's theory of Designing for All Five Senses.

Lee hopes to inspire great multi-sensory experiences, by creating things, objects and products with five senses in mind. According to Lee's research, the best design involves all five senses, making that the perfect multi-sensory experience amongst all activities.

Lee creates a Five Senses Graph to help aid in the design process to feed our five senses :

Illustrated based on Lee's graph. Graph illustrates my personal review of drinking a can of Coke.

Thank God for Lee's talk.

Fuel for my thesis direction and purpose has been re-discovered.

Start of all things : A sense of direction and interest

I am carrying on with my last semester’s Statement of Intent, “engaging audiences through the use of sensory experiences”.

I’ve been reading around on a bi-zillion of topics on new dining experiences, what get’s people talking, the change in societies and cultures, for starters I’ve got a long list of books I need to read on. It’s so long I don’t know where to start. From marketing, economic, anthropology to psychology, good thing about it all, it’s everything I am madly interested in.

The book that tops the list is one by Sid Lee, on how to get everyone talking.

If I ever need to pick the ideal creative agency I wish to intern and work at, it’ll be Sid Lee. Simply love their experimental styles of advertising. After all, they were the few who pioneered the thought of making commercials look stylized to a point it looks like a short film.