on the things i do here

17th April 2010. approximately another week before the campaign i've been working on for like mad goes online. its absolutely how crazy i've worked for this . i've not slept properly ever since the chinese new years break (2 months now), all my weekdays are commited to work, 14 hours a day at least, i start at 930am and go home at 12 midnight, sometimes 3am, i go for korean and my entrepreneurship classes on the weekend, i'm on call 24/7, i go back to work on sunday night and then the whole week repeats itself again.


this is almost as tiring as when i was in Sheares as the blockhead. except that back then i got to skip classes and sleep in whenever i wanted to. and that if anything screws up real bad, its not like someone invested in 250K USD for a 2 month long event.

but strangely i think i'm in love.

working in a R&D Advertising has honestly been one of the most exciting career/internship decisions i've made thus far. its closely tied to what i've been studying for the 3 years that i was in NUS (Communications and New Media) and it feels as though that everything that i've learnt in textbooks and projects are leaping out into real life. planning campaigns, buying the appropriate media channels, learning how to do viral marketing, coming up with a good communication message, measuring ROIs and yada yada yada. the only difference is that the chinese market is so much bigger than singapores. a good message is one that easily spreads to at least a few million, a good campaign website can expect 5 million visits in a day.... its just madness how gigantic the potential is for the internet here. i remember squealing once, just from reading the statistics of a report about the e-commerce businesses here.



just amazing.



some say that the chinese are copy cats, but the way i see it, the chinese have made what was initially good, even better.and why so judgemental? the japanese did it with sony and their cars. i've tried yahoo auctions, ebay and amazon and other e-commerce platforms, but taobao(the biggest C2C platform in china) beats all of them hands down. its functionality is impeccable, its business model is so simple but yet profitable and at the same time it has improved the lives of so many sellers and buyers.

and if u ask me, Tencent never intended for QQ to be a replica of MSN, it was the first mover, who recognised the needs of the Chinese users for a messenger that is simple, fun, fast and functionable, and tailored their functions to these exact needs.in fact, the only thing that the chinese internet users deserve to have but dont is a better search engine, not crappy Baidu that actually does manual searches, but also at the same time, not Google that doesn't do Chinese character searches as well.

I guess i can't emphasize how much i've learnt about the Chinese internet eco-system, and everyday i feel as if theres just so much more to learn and to be excited about. of course its no silicon valley for now, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have the chance to be the next beeg thing.


(: i'm so glad i came here.