Picture credit goes to Shane Holladay.
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Monthly Archives: November 2009
Pakistan Fashion Week
Went to the Friday night showing for the ‘First Annual Pakistan Fashion Week’. Okay, I will skip all the general commentary about contrasts in Pakistani society, conservative vs. extremely un-conservative…blah blah blah.The show was good.(Un-conservative: that’s going to be my new work for opposite of conservative given all the heavy meaning and language politics words can have.)Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take any “unauthorized” photographs (not that I would have anyways; way to look like a newbie) – so there isn’t much to post about.LOVED. This once girl (crowd) was wearing this lone vertically stripped poncho/long loose shirt off the shoulder type things. She also had a clutch in similar vertical stripes but thinner – which I LOVED. I was planning to pull a Sartorialist and be all like, I have a fashion blog can I photograph you? But the crowd after the show was insanely packed.Also loved the show for Sanam Chaudhry; it was full of flowing fabrics in amazingly vibrant colors. A lot of the peices were very vintage-y which I loved. Here collection was definitely very wear-able even if it wasn’t that innovative.I also really loved Maheen Hussain’s show which was basically scarfs and bags. I really loved the way she styles and showcased her products, and I the color combination were mouth watering-ly delicious.The last show was Rizwan Beyg and it was amazing – in all white with pearl embellishments and hand crafted his pieces were a work of art. Obviously, totally un-wearable but all about what clothes as art.The show was really well organized; even when the ‘bijli went out’ – the organizers did a great job. I also liked that they had awards for the best dressed women / men in the crowd. It was fun to get the interaction; an also all about how fashion is people own personal style.A LITTLE LESS LOVED.I was annoyed about the bored people looked at the time as if they didn’t really want to be there. Booo to the jaded socialite look. Also, boo to people that were clapping a little too loud and hooting! OMG.I was really enjoying the music too – especially whatever was playing during the Ismail Farid men’s wear collect. I can’t stop my body from moving when the beat is so good; but as expected everyone else was just sitting there with a bored look.Regardless – the fashion show was great. Hope to see a lot more of them in the future!
My life in a poll
Some of my peeps would know that I’m in a ‘virtual cold war’ with a certain someone. I decided to do a survey of what my response should be….
Umbreen's Survey
The results are in. Seems like the consensus is that I should call it a truce of sorts. I have equal parts of peeps who would recommend I act like the US (impose embargoes) or like North Korea (truth bombs).
Survey Results
If you haven’t heard: We are facing tough economic time(z)
For most of my 5+ years of working career I’ve been on the media side, first on the classifieds end (BuySell.com) and then on the classifieds + content end (Autonet.ca ).On the media end your energy is divided between building interesting content (so that the people come), figuring out how to sell the advertising around that content (what do the advertisers want? how do we efficiently use all out inventory?).In between there is lots of planning, building and tracking metrics, internal politics and fighting for resources – much like anywhere else.Now I’m working on the agency side the experience has been very different and eye opening. I’m generally lucky to be working at a digital agency where we do both planning, buying, strategy, web applications, social media et al. so the work is interesting and varied for the most part.Things I wish I knew back that that I know now: (I dare you to say this 10x)The benefits developing a close relationship with the buying agency (And umn… no I don’t mean in the kick-back kind of way…)It always surprises me how little interaction the local media sites (for the most part) have with us despite the fact that we probably account for a large portion of the overall online buys.I guess it’s because generally the online industry is so small here, it’s not enough revenue to really matter. But if you are spending significant money to build an online platform – you should be spending at least a decent amount of time trying to figure out how to effectively monetize it!My non rocket science advice:1. Please don’t place ad spots at the bottom of the page as studies has shown that fewer eye balls see them2. Please try to make your ad placement in BigBox (or LREC as they call it here) because it offers the most design options.3. I would also love to see some interesting creative size like the half page ad; I tried it on Autonet.ca where the ad spaces could support both a BigBox or a Double Big Box (for the same CPM rate!) but for whatever reason it did not become popular. I guess you have to be a site like the NY times for an advertiser to want to make special creative for you. I know from out end; we would be happy to include it in the plan to see what the response was like.I do have some junior level rocket science advice (develop a network by partnering with other sites; find ways to track users and serve them ads! take over the world! no wait… scratch the last one) but that’s for another post.On the other hand I’m glad I’m NOT on the media side right now. As a digital agency we focus a MOST of our attention on strategies for developing engagement directly with the customer through both Facebook and web applications and connecting directly via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WAP sites, SMS contest, developing blogs or even content portals.Once media was such an important component; now it’s increasingly irrelevant.Tough economic times for my favorite sites like NYTimes and TorontoStar.Although I haven’t been to either site in at least two weeks; but I did spend most of my ‘downtime’ today getting to level 21 on Mafia Wars and streaming the new episodes from The Daily Show…
4 Indispensible Tools for any Marketer
1. Google ReaderIf you don’t know what an RSS feed is, learn about it now and start using them! For the rest of us, we all know the number one challenge (in any industry) is keeping up to date with what is happening in your field.RSS feeds make life 1000% easier since you can easily track the blogs/websites/people that you find most interesting.Google Reader is in my opinion the best way to manage and keep track of your RSS feeds especially you’ve got a built-in network of colleagues who are also using it to share items of interest. 2) Screen Capture ToolsBelieve it or not, I have three (3!) screen capture tools installed in my browser.Although anyone in the online field (online media, marketing, web development, product management) would I have more uses for these tools; I find it hard to imagine a job where there is no need to ever capture an area of the screen.
- Notable App: I recently discovered NotableApp and have started using it. The best things about NotableApp is that it allows you to quickly and easily highlight certain areas of your screen capture and add notes. You can also email the link to the screen capture with your notes; though I generally end up saving and sending a pdf. The personal version is free to use, allows for up to 3 users and 3GB of storage. Noteable has a firefox plugin which makes it very handy. The big drawback is that it doesn’t let you grab an image outsize of your browser screen – and sometimes you need to include info on browser setting (i.e. for reporting bugs) or the date and time the screenshot was captured.
- Aviary is a mind-bogglingly cool company. This have a full suite of tools online applications for editing including an image editor (Phoenix) a vector editor (Raven) and a newly launched audio editor called Myna. Given our internet speed; full-fledged image editing online is a little too slow; but this company is definitely going to be a game changer for things like Photoshop and Illustrator in the future. (Are they watching and creating their own competitive products? Hello… anyone out there?) Anyways, I mostly use their screen capture tool called Talon. Again it has a Firefox extension so image capture is an easy one-click away. Talon let’s you capture an area of the screen or the full screen and you can edit the image using Falcon which is an image mark-up tool, if needed. Again there is no way to capture info outside of the browser scree
- Screencast is by TechSmith makers of SnagIt. In my previous job as product manager SnagIt was probably the most used tool. But since there is not free version of the tool I’ve had to go greener (cheaper?) pastures. Screencast needs to be downloaded and installed onto your computer. You can capture a whole page, visible page only or a portion of the page but the best part of Screencast is that you can capture videos. This is really handy if you want to explain an interaction to a developer, or need to capture an interaction. You also get space to store your videos on Screencast which is great as you can easily add links to things in presentations without blowing up the size of your presentation.
3) Delicious Using delicious is probably nothing new for most marketers, I add this to the list because it’s probably one of the tools I use every day. I’ve become a religious bookmarker and I save anything I find remotely interesting – creating presentations becomes so much faster when you don’t have to hunt for the right references and examples. Searching for your bookmarked items in delicious is usually pretty good as you can search based on title, tags or comments. Probably one of the under-used items in delicious is where you can explore other people public tags of things; it’s a good way to hunt out relevant pages/sites/things/ideas. 4) Brand Monitoring ToolsThere are tons of tools that help you monitor your brand online; totally indispensible if you are a brand / marketing / product manager. Although there are many, Viral Heat, PeopleBrowsr and more, the only one I’ve used is Social Seek because again its free.It takes less than 5 mins to download, install and setup SocialSeek. You enter your brand name and it will monitor it on a range of websites including Blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Images on Flickr.This is just my list; what would you add to it?This post was also published on PakMediaBlog @ http://pakmediablog.net/otherstuff/4-indispensible-tools-for-any-marketer/