Been Missing.

Hello.

 

I  do apologise. It’s been a while since I wrote anything on here. I went through a time when I felt very annoyed with university and subsequent work. I wrote about it here but there’s been a lot more added to it.

There are times when we are reminded that we pay £3,150 per year for our tuition. Even more so when we know there’s a new campus being built and possibly every last penny is going into it, nevermind any other grants the institution might be receiving. I’ve seen the election barometer and it looks a bit funny – not sure whether to be happy that I’m only paying three grand or that I’m in university at all. For what it’s worth it is a privilege at times when I feel like I’m making good use of the facilities and grey matter of lecturers.

But sometimes I feel I am being cheated. That the breakdown we’re being told, of one lecture missed being the equivalent of about 90p out the window makes me angry.

I mentioned in the last entry that we’ve had assignments recycled from past years. Which in itself isn’t such a bad thing. If I had a cracking assignment to hand out to students to see how they measure up year after year I’d do the same. But the problem is some people have not bothered to update them – not so much as the cover sheet that says “This is a case study from 2007″.

It leads to worse problems like old hand-in dates. Old marking criteria. What was worth 40% last year is only worth 20% this one. The 5th of November last year was not mid Reading Week. There comes a need to check and then double check with everyone, and worst of them all, some assignments hadn’t even been ready when they were announced. “We will have the assignment up by X date…” meant fewer and fewer days to have a go at it when everything’s been cramped up around the same dates.

There’s nothing left to do but to sigh, grab the laptop with one hand and the pen in the other hand and do everything on your own. Tell whoever you can and help whoever you want to help through the year because for the first time since I came to university, they don’t seem to care about us as much as they used to. And by care I mean having the decency to give us information that isn’t misleading.

So yes, it’s not been great.

We Are Reasonable People

If you know WARP Records you will know where the title comes from but this entry is going to be far from reasonable. It is in fact my primordial rage combined with talking to someone who can, ahem, talk some sense into me. Because most of the time, Nathan (whom you’ve seen in entries around this blog; if not, say hi) will tell me to be quiet and think things through (even if in an indirect fashion sometimes).

But there’s something I can’t help and that’s the general feeling that university has gone from being OK to being not so OK in my 3rd year. I doubt it’s a case of me getting smarter or getting experience in advertising because it’s something I sensed at the very beginning. Not that anyone would listen but it’s just a way of acknowledging some things in the hopes that someone might:

I try to be reasonable in saying that…

• Since we started, I don’t think anyone knows what the departments inside an ad agency are. Unless they researched themselves. Despite this being a ‘management’ course for advertising & brands.
• Having two lecturers for one module is a way to relieve staff from some duties but unless they’re relevant, their styles are so different it’s horrible. The only time it was ever good was in Market Research and one was a quant researcher and the other a qual researcher. Made sense to me.
• When they want to contact us, they only do it on the intranet which is a shame as emails are free; text messages would be much better if they gave us the opportunity to update our contact details more than once a year when we enrol;
• Reading slides is generally a bad idea. If you’re going to say the same thing we might as well not bother coming to hear the slides read out loud for an hour.
• Anything over 20 slides has to either be an important subject or too much waffling. Less is more, y’know. I am still shocked by a 43-slide presentation on segmentation in our 3rd year when it should be a mere mention in 1 slide, not a whole hour of it.
• Talking to people about time management and turning up late is also bad. Agendas? You bet.
• Not putting up things on the intranet to force the lazy sods who don’t bother to come in is a bad idea too. Others might have a good reason for not turning up and being in the dark ain’t fun.
• What do you mean you don’t DO emails? If you don’t DO emails in this day and age, at least set up a FAQ or something for those unreasonable queries that you’re oh so annoyed with and enjoy your negative feedback for your DND sign on your forehead.
• Assignments and lectures that haven’t been update are bad, mkay? If you’re asking me to do 2006 or 2007’s assignment and make projections for 2010 you’re doing it wrong..and many companies have new logos, new strategies, new..everything from a year ago till today.

That is all for now. There certainly are things I appreciate but this is not an entry about things I appreciate. Some of them make up for these but not all of them do.

In Wales

…we got nearly no Welsh mud, but had an awesome weekend. Still not sure how I managed to

a) sleep about 5 hours and leave at 6.30
b) eat so much in one day
c) climb up the Llanberis path and then down the Watkin path with my level of fitness being null and all that
d) eat so much the day after

I just want some bacon!

0.5 degrees

Crib Goch & lakes (apparently means red peak)

Sugar high

Not enough sleep? Nevaaaaaaa’
Mountain unicycling

My future office

Getting late

A Girl has to be 2 Things

Coco Chanel says she has to be classy and fabulous. Modern life says she has to be busy and still look fabulous (or at least composed).

Busy because you’re busy by default and apparently women spend on average 76 minutes to get ready in the morning. We hate it when men wake up 10 minutes before they have to leave because, at least for me…

• Showering and scrubbing takes 7-10 minutes
• Hair maintenance: also about 5 minutes
• Foundation: 2 minutes (worse for those who do wear make-up)
• “What am I going to wear today?”: 8-10 minutes
• Breakfast: 4 minutes
• Read emails, answer emails (why at 6.30 don’t ask): 5 minutes
• Washing up and other hausfrau duties: 2 minutes (or more)
• Find bag, find papers, notebook, chargers and shove into bag: 6 minutes

Which is an awful lot and I don’t even have children. But it just seems like you can’t make it any shorter, unless you skip breakfast, emails and have some clothes ready the night before. It doesn’t happen though or rarely does. By the time it’s 10 I’m tired and by 2 I’m tired of those asking if I’m ok. I’m still just tired.

So this brings us to a very overlooked detail surrounding habits after work rather than before: Mintel says that nearly 30% of women see going out for dinner as the perfect way to avoid cooking and washing up.

When you have to be classy and fabulous, who wants to get down and dirty? Not many of us. So either we don’t eat properly or don’t eat at all but it’d be brilliant if someone cooked for us or decided to take us out more often.

Me & Everyone Else

You may have heard me slagging off a recent NHS campaign that was aimed at areas around Birmingham for reasons which go beyond me; because if you see it and wonder why it’s for Birmingham alone you might make a funny connection between them obviously being familiar with being beaten up and smoking. But hopefully in the real world, people don’t know it’s only broadcast there and again hopefully, they ask themselves why so violent?

Today I would like to slag off something similar coming from the NHS. You may have noticed that there’s a trend on twitter to get a ‘I <3 NHS’ display image overlay which I haven’t really bought into. You might say I’m biased but those who really love the NHS are fortunate enough to live around the area of a good hospital or have never actually had close encounters with it. Saying this because I’m very sure good people work for it but as I said, personally I’m not exactly loving the NHS as a whole, no matter how nice my doctors and nurses are. It’s true they make mistakes and blunder quite often with things you can’t just guess but it’s a matter of luck (or lack of it) to be among those mistreated.

The problem isn’t this – it’s that the NHS seems like it has a lot of money to spend. It’s a very uneducated guess and I don’t want to know what the actual figure is but if the Government spends roughly £200m (again the sum is unknown and it’s a lucky guess) on advertising and PR or other forms of communication, the NHS must be spending less yet still have a considerable budget.

It comes up with some very good things at times (like Change4Life) but my biggest gripes were all the anti-smoking campaigns. For years and years I would go to Adeaters’ night and British adverts with car crashes, blood and gore made the audience shudder and recoil in a bad way. Thousands of dissertations must have been written on shock advertising and its effects but if you’ve seen recent ‘Hook’ adverts with people who look appear to be pulled by an invisible force you will understand a different path communications has taken: not just make smokers reconsider their habit, but make it repulsive to everyone else so they put pressure on smokers around them. Followed closely by ‘I’m not afraid of clowns, I’m afraid of my dad dying from smoking’

These are anything but consistent. It’s not like throwing 2-3 balls at a person and them not catching any, it’s about throwing ball, after ball, after ball, after ball…and them getting the hell out of the room so you just stop throwing anything at them altogether. Let’s try this, maybe this will work..

So Leo Burnett have come up with a campaign called ‘Teenagers’ for NHS’s TeenLifeCheck. I hope and pray that Leo Burnett are sensible people as I don’t know them, but the campaign seems strangely misguided.

If you visit the website you do a ‘quiz’ that will tell you if you’re normal or not in comparison with others and tell you all about what you should do to live a healthy life. What I’m not sure is what knob thinks of themselves in terms of ‘I eat fruit, vegetables and plenty of water. I try to eat really healthily.‘ It’s very nice if you do but if you’re ready to make a statement like that about yourself you probably don’t have to take this quiz anyway.

And if you stare at the ads (they’re not all press, they’re OOH to some extent – you see them in bus stops) I’m not sure how you can think ‘This is really talking to me. I see myself in these people. Wow.’ For what it’s worth, the chaps from the local colleges in the area think these are losers instead of looking at themselves (as the advert wants them to, I mean). The casting itself makes me want to puke – if someone says ‘teenagers from different backgrounds’ you come up with two black British teens, a (possibly) Indian one, a freckled white boy and a girl with large, round earrings. If you see what I see or think what I think, it’s a shame to use them like that.

With so much money to spend on advertising, why is it that these ads are so bad?

Bringing the Familiar to the Unfamiliar

A while back I went to the IMAX to watch Star Trek but due to some technical difficulties, the lights in the cinema just wouldn’t go off. Because it was a premiere day, the fans with badges and t-shirts had already filled up the place and were probably very much eager to see the show.

First half an hour and they tried a lot of combinations, like you do when you’re in a big meeting room with complex lighting systems: this switch turns this off but not these, you flick all of them and some go off but others stay on and so on and so forth. You just never get it right.

A member of staff or the manager (can’t remember) came in the first 5 to 10 minutes and said they were really sorry and explained what the problem was, as improbable as it sounded at the time. He thanked us for being a nice, civil audience and understanding the problem and props to him, he was honest and prompt about it.

Some minutes after the first half an hour, the problem still hadn’t been fixed but the audience wasn’t too bad; they weren’t shouting or whistling which was refreshing for once. Same manager came in from time to time to let us know they were still working on it and again thanked us for being understanding. A man shouted from the back this time and said “Just leave the lights on, it’ll be like at home watching telly in the lounge!”

We all laughed and yadda yadda, everyone took it in good spirit and the manager even joked and said that at home you don’t pay £8 to wait so long to watch something and that they want to deliver the full IMAX experience etc.

But what amused me was the fact that the idea didn’t sound so bad after all that waiting. Apart from ‘just cut the power cord’ suggestions, this was a semi-desperate ‘I don’t care how you deliver it, just deliver it’ message.

Then I got on a train and saw this:

It’s a XCountry toilet with a bunch of newspapers inside. It’s sad enough that I took the picture but I was about to get off anyway. To me it was just a way in which people have responded to either bad train service (Virgin gives you a free magazine at least) or just a boring train journey. Just a small thing to keep you sane and distracted from stuff. The newspaper in the loo.

It’s brilliant if you ask me -at least whoever left it there was a nice chap who thought about others too. It’s a tabloid nevertheless but the gesture matters. Bringing a bit of the familiar to the unfamiliar or at any rate, unfriendly. And if you want, a way to add ownership to a place that’s not ours. Or just how we impose our own identity on borrowed spaces in order to regain power we see being taken from us.

Proof that we can keep calm and carry on!

Was it the Tight Pants?

In Bed

Here’s some really, really good stuff on a subject that’s really embarrassing to talk about but will probably never see any recognition in the UK if it’s to be judged by the small print in the bottom. In Bed is a website from Bayer Schering Pharma AG that hosts a few videos on how to overcome problems down there. It’s got some brilliant thoughts in it to address both those who know the myths everyone talks about aren’t true and those who still think some solo activities make you go blind. Plus it’s animated and hand-drawn as a bonus to eliminate common myths around the subject of potency and background.

It’s a shame it’s only for audiences outside the US and the UK but I can’t blame them. I just wish the NHS would stop popping out stuff like Fight Back and start talking some sense into people in a way that they can relate to. I bet everyone feels like they get beaten up real good when they smoke, too.

A Burning Question

With the comforts of modern living, will we all live to be 100?

No, we might all just get fat and die earlier anyway.

Fiat 500

The tiny Fiat 500 that’s meant to be the world’s cutest car with a retractable roof and all has some really nice advertising which seems to cash in on small feel-good things of day-to-day life. The ashes won, back in the UK from after the hols, leaves under foot, smiles, ice-creams and cream cakes. Which is all very nice.

So they let people create a ‘feel good’ playlist on Spotify – The Fiat 500C Feelgood 50 Playlist (spotify http link). I’m taking this with a pinch of salt – it’s got music like Abba, A-ha, Aerosmith, Bowie, Bon Jovi, Dire Straits and some others. It makes you think this dates back from a while ago and not that I can’t appreciate that but it makes it hard to pin down. Is this Spotify audience or is this Fiat’s audience? And apart from being just a nice playlist, does it actually make anyone consider a Fiat? Fiat’s ’young stylish and affluent’ (and ‘no-frills’ if you want but I hate the word) consumer who wants the car to make a statement about himself or herself might not be on spotify. And the ones who are might be a tad old for the car. Think Fiat might be in for a surprise soon.

There and Back #1

This is the sort of entry where I don’t know what I’m trying to say but there are some thoughts that I might elaborate on later. I just have this newly discovered spare time before uni actually starts so there was something about The Eurostar vs. Airlines thing that got me thinking.

Disclaimer: I do travel a bit and spend reasonable amounts of time in airports, train stations and what not;

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Eurostar stop, Gare du Nord

Andrew talked about the convenience & hassle-free travel that the Eurostar to  Brussels gives you and rightly so; if I could go to where I want on a train that doesn’t ask me to drag my luggage across terminals, I’d be very, very happy. But it’s still ‘one train station to another‘ because trains are already ingrained in our culture. Live in a country where train travel is nearly unheard of and trains become an exciting adventure. Trains are usually meant to drop you off ‘there’ but still ‘here’ unless you’re on the Eurostar or Orient Express. You get off and you know you’re in the same country.

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Manchester International, some time late at night with a phone camera

Planes on the other hand – I don’t think it’s the airport itself that makes the difference but the nature of travel itself. It’s probably the waiting that makes you feel like you’re doing something unusual. Waiting at London Heathrow (5) I overheard two ladies discussing the loo so I went in there to check it myself see what the fuss was about but it was just a motion-detecting flush system that got them excited. It was something they had never seen before; something I take for granted because I see it in shopping mall loos was new and brilliant to them. Which is part of the magic of the airport for some people.

Then there’s the passport control gates and I won’t talk about symbolism but there’s a change. You don’t have a plane ticket and luggage and passport, you can’t go any further. Everyone else stops here. You enter (even if you don’t think about it) a place where other people like you have a purpose – they’re all going somewhere and doing something and you stop thinking about the outside world. It infuriates my boyfriend and family whom I always forget to text to say I’m at the airport. If I haven’t before I went past passport control, I’ll only remember on the plane. Too late. It transcends how crap the airline might treat you and its equivalent, the first class lounges in train stations don’t give the same feeling.