Women in advertising-A male point of view

Back in 1998, when I began my career in advertising as a client service executive (Yes, the copywriter was in client servicing at that time!)  women were scarce  in advertising agencies. Once in a while a sophomore doing her MBA will come for an academic project. She will be doing a safe project like “Customer satisfaction of Pepsi in rural area: A study by taking Gondawala district as an example” or “Market penetration of HSBC’s SME loans” or something like that. From my agency we will go for creative presentations, and only very rarely I have seen women sitting in as brand managers. But there were some good agencies run by very able women, and those agencies are still doing well. There were some good women in client servicing too, but the creative department was predominantly a male bastion. Creative directors, exceptionally good ones, are normally males. (Please don’t call me an MCP!).

I am against any stereotyping. I know talent only matters and sex does not play a role in it. But sometimes I do wonder about the influence genes have on us, which we cannot change even with best mentoring.

May be that is why we don’t have

1. A female musician that can be called truly great, great enough to be placed along with Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. Please note that I am not talking about singers, I am talking about great music composers or directors. Females somehow miss this composer gene.

2. A great physicist. Yes I know about Madam Curie, but she was more of an experimental physicist than a theoretical genius. Almost all great theoretical physicists are males.

3. Great female chefs are hard to find. Even though women outnumber men in the number of people that actually cook, excellent cooks are normally men. This confuses me to the core, but, just think for a while and you will see I have a point.

4. Have you heard of a female philosopher? A real philosopher who has created her own school of thoughts? I am still yet to come across one.

I am not being all negative about women. I am just pointing out the realities, and I am not judging why the reality is like this.

Advertising still remains as a male dominant territory. Gorgeous women client servicing executives will come and go, but patiently I am still waiting for a woman who will wow me, not with her looks, but with her brains.

And especially in this part of the world, how long shall I wait?

Paris Hilton coming to Dubai: MY New BFF.

Are you lonely? Need a friend and a shoulder to cry? It’s very easy, just run a reality TV show searching for a new friend. Being a celebrity might help. Being Paris Hilton will indeed help. Or else why should Ms. Hilton visit Dubai looking for a BFF?

To become a celebrity is like making a successful box office film: everybody knows why a film is successful after it becomes successful, but nobody can predict it beforehand. Doing things that will make public interested will make you a celebrity, but that alone does not guarantee press coverage when you breakup with your boyfriend or your African parrot is sick. That needs some secret ingredient “X” and I think Ms. Hilton has it abundantly. You have to consistently do things that will make people amused, do weird and controversial things. And you have to make sure that you look, smile, breath and even sleep differently compared to common folks like you and me.

Yes, it’s all advertising. It’s public relation working at 10, 0000 rpm. It’s defining a pseudo reality that will make you or I seem weirdly different and using financial, advertising & PR muscles to create, sustain and reassure this weird image, consistently…

Public Relation Agencies love celebrities (& big corporations). Big corporations need PR as they have something to hide from the public, something to correct, something to be tamed and made appropriate. Celebrities need PR to do the opposite, something to be seen as weird, something to undomesticate and to do or say inappropriate. When things go wrong, companies hire PR to make public believe everything is alright. Conversely, when public see nothing wrong in a celebrity, he or she hires a PR to make something wrong so that he or she can be the center of attraction again.

Yes, this is what you have to do. Always do something that will make you stand apart, even if doing that will make you look like a jack ass.

Ms. Paris Hilton, hereby I heartily welcome you to Dubai and UAE. May you find the friend you are looking for in the first episode of the program itself!

Al Qasba Food festival: it’s time to visit Sharjah

When Al Qasba was known as Qanat Al Qasba, before its repositioning, it was a secluded place where not many families visited. Even its existence was not that much known. As they drove past that big giant wheel while going to Rolla, people often wondered what sort of a place that it is. Even on Fridays its restaurants were almost vacant. I always wondered how they manage to pay salaries to these smiling faces.

Now time has changed. The new advertising campaign promoting the place “Al Qasba” as a family get together destination is showing results. This shift in positioning, balancing heritage and modernity is bringing people to the place. Al Qasba is slowly becoming a place families look forward to visit on weekends, and food festival acts as an event helping it ascertain this position.

For those who came in late, this is the festival activity schedule:

From 19th March to 28th March

Operating Hours
Weekdays    5.00pm to 12 midnight
Weekends    5.00pm to 1.00am

Cooking demonstration
Daily from 8.30pm to 9.15pm

Cooking competition
Daily from 9.30pm to 10.00pm

Cooking secrets and tips
Daily from 10.30pm

Seminars on healthy eating
21st of March, 25th of March, 20mins to 40mins duration

Ronald McDonald Show
19th and 20th March 5.00pm to 6.00pm

See it all to feel it all

Visitors are entertained by dancers and drum parades. Children will find it very exciting!

Various food items, all kinds of restaurants: Japanese, Indian, Thai, Lebanese, Arabian…

Come on, I cannot forget to mention the dancing fountain and the famous giant wheel. It’s great to see children play in these fountains…

Flower and plant display area: amazing flowers and plants at very good price. If you have a home/terrace/balcony garden, don’t miss this place.

Children/teenage fun area; Just look at the pictures to have a feel…

One good thing is that Al Qasba is near Sharjah Aquarium. So if you plan well, you can visit both the places in a single trip.

Looking for a copywriter job? Then learn the ad agency buzzwords…

Assets
Things that have earning power or some other value to the agency only when they reach  municipality garbage collectors. These include rejected brochures and promotional paraphernalia (big ones, medium ones, small ones, spot laminated ones, saddle-stitched ones, press bound ones etc) Style Only-No Brain client service executives, unhygienic pseudo creative guys.

Fixed Assets (also known as long-term assets) are things that have a life of more than 35 yrs but have no use for the advertising agency at present, for example old graphic designers dreaming about spray cans and have no necessary software skills, 1995 Mac machines, creative briefing tables; there are also intangible fixed assets, like the bad reputation of the agency for taking any job and promising to finish it on a single day, from painting the highway to sending people to moon.

Acid Quick Assets
Assets that are all curves but no brains. High heeled, highly made up (false hair, false eyelashes, false everything!) things that appear like comets. Nobody knows when a new one joins and when one quits: quick in both appearing and disappearing. Largely seen on husband/father visas.

Bear Market
In a bear market, creativity hibernates and creative team, anticipating job losses, tends to act busy. This can create a self-sustaining downward spiral. Clients will dictate terms even to an inter-galactic ad agency and art directors, copywriters, graphic designers, client service directors all will peacefully coexist like brothers. They even assemble to yawn as a team every half an hour.

When the market is bearish, client servicing guys look and act like poor rabbits. They will appear so cute that you will feel like pampering them at your laps and say sweet nothings into their ears. They pawn or sell their Mustangs, Corvettes, Suzukis, Kawasakis and BMWs and opt to walk home- alone. This soul reflecting lone act of walking helps them to brood on their credit card problems. (Also refer the title, Credit Crunch)

Credit Crunch
The situation is created when copywriters, graphic designers and client servicing guys lose all their money buying very expensive lifestyle gadgets like Black berries, iPhones, Mac Books etc. and look around for more money as  banks stop lending them. Suddenly they realize that when hungry they cannot eat these things and feels like a mermaid gifted with a pair of expensive shoes.

As they approach banks, they use a special mathematical formula to evaluate their potential repayment strength. This equation is as given below,

LRPc = [{[We x NCC] + 2 x HL +Nc} x Pseudo lifestyle index

LRPc is the loan Repayment capacity
We is the weight of one’s purse.[As the number of existing credit card increases, weight of the purse increases, hence reduced repayment capacity. Weight can also increase due to the presence of large number of coins, which in turn indicates the possibility that he is already a beggar. Thus lower repayment strength.]

NCC is the number of existing credit cards
HL is their greedy home loan which is also called Monkey business.
Nc is the number of sports cars.
Pseudo Lifestyle Index varies between 0 and 1. A normal advertising agency professional has this index between 0.5 and 1.

Financial crisis: Kerala real estate prices likely to go down

kerala real estate will find prices correcting

Last night, I had a crisis call from a real estate agent based in Kerala. It was not a regular call to an NRI inducing him to invest in a property, but rather a distress call to resell an existing house plot. He told me that this is the right time to buy as he thinks apartments and land plots are coming under great resale stress and prices are falling down in Kerala. Like anywhere else in the world, Kerala real estate is feeling the market pressures of limited liquidity. 3-4 years back, the rising land prices made it impossible for any resident Indian to purchase property in Ernakulum, Kakkanad, Trivandrum, Alleppey or any other place where real estate was booming. And then the money hungry banks and property agents turned to gulf residents and other NRI Indians, making the land prices to skyrocket. The nonresident Indians took loans from banks in their residing countries and stuffed these greedy speculators. This business model was very successful, until now. Today NRIs find it hard to raise cash sources to pay their installments. Very soon huge payment defaults will occur as they find it very hard to even sustain their normal life in their respective residing countries. Inflated prices will face the harsh market realities and tumble down; in the process hurting many speculators.

Financial crisis, advertising agencies and copywriters in Dubai & UAE

 

Real estate crisis and copywriter

It’s good news at last for copywriters and creative people. We advertising guys (there is no such term as “advertising gals” and high fashion lipstick wearing-high heel tom boys are ignored for time being) are going to inherit the world when sub-prime mortgage crisis, PUT-CALL future options, real estate bubbles and bank runs make the newspaper headlines. Copywriters, Graphic designers and art directors from advertising agencies in Moscow, Trinidad, Dubai, Sharjah, Lower Manhattan, Uzbekistan, Minnesota, Calcutta, Kerala and Algeria will benefit from this global financial real estate meltdown. This is how we are going to do it. This strategy has been discussed and finalized in a big 7 star hotel located at Eldorado by Copywriters & Ad Guys Inc. (registered in Cayman Island, Reg. No: 0909878976/NB/435/12). Creative guys (sorry, no women again!) secretly discussed this with all their financial wisdom and IQs above 134.9 to decide on three strategies.

1.    We have decided to trade all our skills as real estate copywriters and brochure designers to raise 7689 credit default swaps (CDS). As a regulatory measure to guard against excessive risk-taking in the financial system we will thereby sub-prime all our assets in the main financial markets. This will indeed followed by three regulatory marathon races by amateur orangutans aged more than 53 yrs to have sufficient assets to meet our contractual obligations, through reserve requirements, capital requirements, and other limits on leverage. Possible Financial contagion effects will be nullified by introducing 29 new advertising agencies issuing IPOs throughout the coming year.

2.    As Bank Runs (BRs) can be avoided by cash injection, the possible cash crunch in the market is coordinated with excess liquidity. All copywriters registered with Copywriters & Ad Guys Inc. will persuade printing presses around the world to print Hedge-Bonds in 6 colors (Alizarin Crimson as the special color to induce liquidity leverage). This will reduce recession by quarter 3(Q3) and bring the asset-liability mismatch to alarming rates, enabling trans border wealth creation. All financial instruments will be proportionately linked with EXIM policies and directly pegged with dollar(USD).

3.    Stock Markets around the world will be induced into a PUSH strategy by PULL strategies. But if the market adopts PULL strategy first (due to Butterfly effect) they will be induced by PUSH strategies.

We creative guys are going to save the world. We are going to give back the real estate its lost glory. We copywriters and graphic designers are going to bring liquidity into the world. “Ha! you Mr. Liquidity, you can’t escape our clutches. We may not have the brain power of those Wall Street guys or the cunning nature of those four piece suit real estate guys. But here we come, BEWARE!”

Sharjah Aquarium, Sharjah, near Al Qasba, UAE

My friends in Dubai are asking me about this new aquarium in Sharjah. All of them want to know more about this place so that they can make a perfect Friday family outing. I was there last week and this is all I have to say about the aquarium…

How to get there:

From Dubai first come to Al Tauwn Mall roundabout. When you are in the roundabout just keep on driving towards Sharjah/Al Qasba and you will reach another roundabout-the Al Qasba roundabout. Take left and drive straight and jump two other roundabouts. From the last roundabout just drive straight and in seconds you can see Sharjah Aquarium.

Sharjah Aquarium

Sharjah Aquarium

Pros:

Lot of parking space

Kids will love it

So far, the place is neat and fresh

A place to take photographs [they won’t allow you to use flash for obvious reasons]

Only 20Dhs per adult [Other family friendly ticket rates are available]

Cons:

Don’t expect a grand aquarium. It won’t take your breath away, especially if you are exposed to National Geographic.

Indian Schools, Car lifts & baby sitting in Dubai, Sharjah, Al Qusais, Karama, Al Nahda, Rolla and Deira.

 

City, it is you!

Come on, tell me. Do you get enough time to spend with your wife/ husband? How early do you wake up to reach your office on time? And how rarely you reach back on time? How hard it is for you when radio jockeys eat your brains out on every single car journey you make? How much time you waste in traffic waiting to pick your children from babysitting? Can you afford to keep a house maid now? When you are frustrated waiting for a taxi, how do you cry out? Do you people still pray together?

Tell me. Is your child studying satisfactorily? Does he/she know something better than the names of cars and four wheel drives? Are you reading your toddler some stories or you just stuff him with fried chicken and sausage? Are you worried that your 5 year old talks like an adult rather than a child and your girl child is growing faster than she should ever be?

How deep is your credit card debt? When your car’s rear tyre needs to be replaced next month, will you have that extra 550 bucks to pay? Do you have any plans for surviving your next rent renewal?

Don’t feel shame, tell me. You really hope to save on your AC bills as the winter comes, right?

Be frank! Does your family back home know how hard it is for you to meet both ends? Are you sending something back home every month? Do you have anything saved up to make your trip back home on next vacation? Can you do anything about the rising living expenses? Are you calling home at least on Fridays? Can you be a help to your ageing parents when time is ripe? [Or will they die not seeing your face?].

When was the last time you smiled at your partner? And when was the last time he/she smiled at you? How bad you miss your friends? Do you envy your better off friends when you see their smiling pictures in face book, Hi5 or Orkut?

When was the last time, someone asked you, “Are you ok”?

Dear friend, tell me, are you ok?

Six Commandments for Advertising Copywriters, Designers, Media Planners & Client Servicing guys working in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi or UAE.

These immortal laws are applicable not only to Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi or UAE advertising copywriters, designers, media planners & client servicing guys, but also to everyone across the world trying to make a living in advertising.

Thou shall not spend unnecessary time at your work place. But this does not mean thou shall not stretch work timings when situations demand . Respect thy job & advertising agency, but love thy family. Man is not for work, work is for man. [Reference: Chapter 3, Para 7, Verses 4-6, Gospel of work according to a Sarcastic non-award Winning Copywriter, 13.87^th edition]

Thou shall always remember that money, and not creativity, rules the world. If thee are rich, invest in Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman or UAE real estate and become more rich. If thee are creative, know that you cannot be rich, as by the law of nature creative people cannot be rich. [Reference: Chapter 3, Para 11, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life ,by Charles Darwin]

Thou shall not fall into a Credit Card Trap. Know that even though jail is a nice place to daydream, it is a great place to have daymares too. Jail wardens, as a habit, love to break kneecaps. [Reference: Chapter 2, Para 9, A study of Broken Limbs & Legs among Graphic Designers, Copywriters & Media Planners in Dubai, Sharjah and UAE Advertising Agencies; written by A Sarcastic non-award Winning Copywriter, 1st edition]

Thou shall not skip breakfast and should eat at times. Know that clients will come and go, but ulcer stays a lifetime.

Thou shall always listen to client service people. Not because they are right, but because they are dying. Sooner of later they all will be killed by the Marlboro Reds they smoke. [Reference: The Tibetan Book of Dying by Smoking, written by A Sarcastic non-award Winning Copywriter]

Thou shall ride thy motorcycles very carefully as coffin shops are hard to find in UAE. But thou can try thy luck in Rolla by coercing one of those wooden photo frame merchants to coerce their carpenter to make one coffin for thou. If thou manage to get one, tie it strongly and tightly behind thy motorcycle carrier while thou go out for a ride. Thou will never know when thou need one while riding in the car crazy roads of UAE.

UAE Public Holidays for December 2008

As far as I know, these are the public holidays for UAE, December 2008. For the public in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and all the other emirates, eight holidays come and go one by one. Seems like I am going to be very lazy soon. I will read as many books as possible and will watch tons of crap movies.

Dec. 2 Tue National Day

Dec. 3 Wed National Day Holiday

Dec. 7 Sun Eid al Adha Holiday

Dec. 8 Mon Eid al Adha (Feast of Sacrifice)

Dec. 9 Tue Eid al Adha Holiday

Dec. 29 Mon Islamic New Year

CLICK HERE to know why all copywriters go to hell!

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