Received a sudden call from the aunt’s family on the weekend while eating with another relative that I’ve met only once.

She asked if I wanted to travel, away from Beijing, for a bit.

A tinge of excitement was the only thing I could experience in my already dry throat, the same throat thas has been consuming the hottest air this city has experienced in the past 10 years.

“Where”, I asked, with bigger curiousity than ever. I’ve been extended numerous offers by them this past summer, but none of my adventurous requests went through. Last year was a bad one to pick. Everywhere I wanted to go either held an earthquake, flood, or some political disruption.

“We were thinking of Tibet, you wanna come?”

And for those who know me should understand the unhealthy obsession I have with lama attires, hobo bags, mosque shoes, free prairies, horses, cows, sheeps, and the real beauty that exists in only the most genuine and raw conversations between people – not behind screens pressing “like” or “view”, but the kind that chases the sunset like restless children with rural elegance. If you know what I mean. You should.

A copy of my passport was sent to the traveller’s agency for an expedite Tibet Traveller’s Permit application that very afternoon. It would shorten the norm-rate of 7 business days to only three. 24 hours later, I booked my flight. And within 24 hours, my flight will leave. Packing is left unchecked. That will be done first thing in the morning tomorrow (today?).

I think this is going to change my life, like everything that has already happened in this two short months.

But I think this will change me. And I’m not quite sure If i’m ready for all the bombardments yet. I’d have to run to the pharmacy tomorrow morning and grab some medicine to prepare for the high elevations of Tibet (nosebleeds and pounding headaches are common if precautions aren’t taken)

There’s also a smaller assignment I’m about to take-on, along with my cousin, in the next couple of weeks. The relative that took us out for dinner, as a habitual thing, gave us 500RMB each to spend on whatever. We just couldn’t take it. So I wrote a heartfelt letter to her and we folded the bills into hearts and stuffed everything in an envelope and gave it back to her. What we’re going to do is something more meaningful. We’re each taking only 100 RMB and spliting that into 20 pieces of 5 RMB, and we’re going to pay it forward.

I grow sick of the widening gap between the rich and poor in this country. I struggle to understand why there are a billion luxury shopping malls when most people probably don’t even shop there. Because they can’t afford to.

There is still the lady without the leg playing er-hu in front of the empty Burberry, the lost 7-year-old who’s been forced to give out flyers that his parents wouldn’t even care to comprehend, the middle-aged man with an accidental burn on his cheek coupled with simple chalk-words on the sidewalk that explains how he survived the lost hopes.

So instead of spending the money on probably end up being 3.5 cocktails inside Nan Luo Gu Xiang (南锣鼓巷) – my second-home and backyard – we’re trying something else. In the next few weeks, we’ll be travelling to different cities (my cousin’s leaving Beijing to Guangzhou, and I, to Chengdu then Tibet) and we’re going to spread our help across the map into the hands of those who would knock their heads out for that light bill.  We’ll mark each of our 5 RMB with a special symbol so it stays differentiated from all the other bills (if we have anything else) in our wallets. For each person we extend our help to, we’ll photograph them and also write a little note on the who, where, and how’s.

I feel that this will be the best gift we could give, and I can’t wait to take this on in Tibet. I’ll keep all posted.

I’m going to the office in the morning to organize some files and in the afternoon, I’m spending it with my cousin, as it will be my last day with her, to probably a canoe-trip inside Beihai Park, an imperial garden north of the Forbidden City, famous for its river (Beihai).

Stay well, everyone. Get excited for Jia in Tibet. Seriously.

Saatchi & Saatchi Beijing. Landscape shots. Enjoy.

 

I’m currently writing from my new assigned desktop (my own laptop got IP-blocked by the network; long story short, I did nothing gregarious.) and the office seems rather empty today. Everyone’s on different business trips, to receive briefs, give pitches, conduct research, or to meet with clients. I know, how cool is that. You get to blast tunes that radiate a shell of people and their empty spaces (the office is like a “roundabout”, the central circle being where the elevators are situated).

When I talked about my internship with others, I’d often receive the curious remark of “so, what the hell do you do there?”. For the first few days, I couldn’t quite put an answer to that besides “LIKE, BE IN AWE AND DO WHATEVER THAT’S TOLD?” But really, I had to first ingratiate myself to a new circle of people, explore the office by poking around with a Canon, and intruding different groups with requests for more work. Actually, the only day that I felt long was the day that I didn’t take initiative. I hated feeling that. So I stopped and picked my feet up.

I guess I’ll give a brief overview of the projects/activities I’ve been involved thusfar at Saatchi:

1. Tianjin Real-estate

Tianjin is about 20 minutes from Beijing by train. A Singapore-based real estate company called UOL approached us regarding strategic marketing for its new urban-complex in downtown Tianjin, which composes of some luxury apartments, hotel, office buildings, and a shopping mall.

What I’ve been doing is researching on the competitors of UOL, both in the urban complexes and residential categories. I’d need to go on different real-estate search engines and filter out the competitors (based on region, price, or surroundings) and build Excel and Powerpoint doc’s showing the comparison with many parameters. Before I’d always hear that houses are expensive in China but I never realize the impact of it until I start shopping for these properties myself (online, of course)… in Tianjin, it’s around 20,000 RMB/sq or $3000 CAD/sq. For a one-room apartment, it would cost around 1 Million RMB. For a working professional earning 10,000 RMB/month, 1 million isn’t the cheapest route to a concrete hut.

But yet, blocks of buildings are being constructed every single day because there is demand, and there are the sufficient funds on bank account statements to support that, and probably 50 more properties and a string more Porsche’s. My team was planning to fly to Singapore for a pitch in mid-july and a week or so before the scheduled time, the people from the Singapore office called and rescheduled the pitch day to mid-August. Pheww. Changes happen everyday. People worked days and nights preparing the presentation and I guess the sudden call-off, thought optimistically, only gives more time for preparation of a more persuading presentation.

2. Ikea kitchen translations

Like Lexus, IKEA and HP are also big account at Saatchi Beijing. I had been done with the UOL research task so I decided to fetch more tasks from other groups. Fortunately, IKEA actually needed some translations done for a storyboard they just did for the kitchens, so I helped out with that. A fascinating aspect of office-communication in China is that they love using MSN. Almost everyone is on MSN and they use it to transfer files and my supervisor says they even use it to talk with clients. What I considered as only a tool for chatting up with some friends (thus I’m never on MSN at work because I feel “unprofessional”) is actually such a valuable and popular tool for in-house communications. I’ve also learnt about the difficulty of translating copy and making it sound the “same” – direct translations are sometimes your worst enemy and to craft it better, it takes great proficiency because it’s as if you’re writting another copy. Tough job. Luckily they only needed a rough one done.

 3. Taobao Shopping Mall

As some would know, Taobao (淘宝) provides the largest consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platform (ie. I sell to you), similar to a Chinese Ebay where anyone can set up an online-shop, People can register their own shops and sell products ranging from clothing, cosmetics, electronics, books, equipments, and even flight tickets.

Taobao makes 200 billion every year in sales, represents about 85% of the entire Internet-shopping industry, and ranks number one in the C2C industry. It’s HUGE. And now Jack Ma, the genius founder of Taobao that many young entrepreneurs in China aspire to become, had started up another project called Taobao Shopping Mall (淘宝商城) – which shifts it focus from C2C to Business-to-consumer (B2C). It wants to be the largest online mall that sells basically, everything. Right now it’s rather focused on electronics; having many brands such as HP, Sony, and Apple license its rights to Taobao to sell their products on the Taobao Shopping Mall, often at a more preferred price than buying it offline.

 It’s a very fascinating project. Taobao thinks while short-term competitors are 京东商城 (mainly online electronics) and VANCEL (online clothing with a H&M feel), the long-term competitor is actually real shopping malls themselves. Talking about going digital.

So what Taobao wants is a brilliant campaign to build the brand of the TB shopping mall, as well, to differentiate TB shopping mall from Taobao. They just want to kick ass. Greg, the account director in charge of this pitch, went to Shanghai to receive the brief a few days ago. And we helped him with some competitive analysis. We want to help Taobao kick ass, too.

 4. SPIKES Asia 2010 entries

SPIKES is a huge advertising festival, presented by the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, that takes place in Singapore every September to award creative excellence in Asia and Australia. They have a line of top-notch jury as well as speakers this year, including Howard Draft (Founder; Draft), Tay Guan Hin (ECD, JWT Asia), Bob Jeffrey (CEO, JWT Worldwide), Bob Greenberg (CEO, R/GA), Andrew Robertson (CEO, BBDO Worldwide), Sir Martin Sorrell (CEO, WPP), Mark Tutssel (CCO, Leo Burnett Worldwide), Rei Innamoto (CCO, AKQA), and many more from the same 3-am crowds in Cannes. Agencies from around Asia will submit works, similar to what they just did for Cannes, and in September, everyone attends SPIKES (at a lower admission ticket than the French, I’d hope) where they announce the winners and holds a huge party to celebrate the coming-together of creative talents from all over the world.

And luckily, I’m actually helping out with submitting entries for Saatchi. There are about 9 pieces we’d like to submit and for each piece, I’d have to help decide on the general and specific category (there’s about, a million), edit the English synopsis, fill out the creative credits and contact information, and lastly, work closely with the teams that did the works to obtain the necessary footage as we have to submit both online and offline (mail to Singapore). A couple of works have been last-minute additions, such as some videos for the TV/Cinema category (TVC) and it makes it very stressful for everyone because they’d have to catch the deadline on top of their other productions.

So essentially, I enjoy what I do and I like where I am. And I plan on getting to work earlier now to chop more wood before the fire starts its burning.

Please be well everyone, it’s been %#$%ing hot here in Beijing.