The ElliotOwl story

Posted on July 12, 2011 by ElliotOwl

Since coming back to Melbourne, I’ve been meeting with some clever people doing very clever things in Melbourne and Sydney, talking LOLs, Old Spice, social, strategy and general nerdy digital stuff. On special occasions, we will bitch and whine about the shite weather.

I met with Matt Houltham of Naked Comms today (ooh, look at me, playing the name-drop game), and he commented that I might need to take a look at what it is that I want to come of my career. Which got me thinking. And reminded me of this dusty old blog.

When I was 14, I was adamant about working in advertising. I wanted to be a Mad Man. Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi, Y&R – I wanted them all. Smoke like a fish, drink like a chimney, sleep with beautiful mermen/merladies, and, oh yeah, create some beautiful ads that talked to people and won prizes. Mmm, prizes. Yeah yeah, I was probably caught up in the glitz and glamour. Shut up. I was 14.

I enrolled in Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s Mass Communication course in 2005, which absolutely destroyed my beautiful, sparkly one-dimensional dream. The course introduced me not only to advertising, but also to public relations, integrated marketing communications, graphic design, film production, radio production, journalism, photojournalism et cetera, et cetera. Mind fuck, or what?

I loved every single minute of it.

My Mad Man dream had dissipated into nothingness. I decided to stop thinking so much about what I did or who I was working for. I just knew that I wanted to create.

In early 2005, I founded my own online store with my sister selling vintage 35mm Russian cameras. I put all that I had learnt into practice, designing an integrated marketing communications plan, writing all the copy, taking the pictures, designing the marketing collateral and hell, even modelling in some of our shoots (all of which have since been banished into Internet hell, so don’t even try, Google nerds). In three years, we had grown our customer base about ten-fold, expanded the brand into three lines and started selling clothing and accessories, some of which we had designed ourselves.

When I got bored of that, I did couple of internships and freelance stints in boutique advertising/marcomms agencies, always preferring to work in a small team rather than in big, sterile offices. Reasonably confident of my skills and experience, I sold myself as both a suit and a creative, exposing myself to all facets of ad-land. I believed that this was the way to go, to fully immerse myself in the industry by understanding every process possible.

I slowly moved away from agency life and found myself working freelance on projects around the world. By then, I was selling scraps of work to clients in Sydney, LA, San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Montreal, and.. uh.. Jamaica. I was managing projects, creating brand strategy, designing collateral, writing copy and editing videos.

In 2007, I decided to move to Melbourne. I did a degree in media production, and then did well enough to secure a place in RMIT’s Labsome honours programme where I dedicated a year to studying social media marketing in depth. I immersed myself in the digital space, and soon started throwing myself into digital strategy-type projects head-on, believing that the only way I could learn was to put it in practice. I learnt as I went – something I wouldn’t recommend for the faint-of-heart, but doing that taught me much more than any book ever could.

Today, in mid-2011, I am sitting at the desk of my first full-time job. For the first time in my life, I’ve got a boss and a lunch hour. The paid leave, superannuation and Friday beers are pretty sweet bonuses, too. I’m not even going to start on the massive tub of Chupa Chups that Nick brought in to work one day.

I work at SportingPulse as a digital strategist/producer; have been for about two months. While I spend most of my days glaring and being angry at spreadsheets and Outlook, I have also been given the opportunity to develop a brand new social strategy for the company. While things are moving very slowly, given the lack of resources and a general understanding of the social space, I am determined to get this off the ground. Soon. SportingPulse controls a very niche portion of the market, and the possibilities are endless. It will be very interesting to see what we can do commercially once we learn to control the raging beast that is social media.

That said, I still (quite expectedly) find myself hankering to do bigger and better things, and wanting to make amazing things happen with like-minded peers who are at the same level of understanding of the digital and social space as I am. So consider this my open call: if you have something big and beautiful that needs some loving, get in touch. Email me or @ me.

Venice Beach

Posted on March 12, 2011 by ElliotOwl

Like I said, I’m an awful tourist. I barely took any pictures of my travels the last few months (largely due to the fact that my Panasonic LX-3 decided to die on me the day after I landed in LAX). This is one of my favourite photographs from the trip, though. A samba beach party in Venice Beach, where people rocked up with drums and guitars, played music and danced to the setting sun.

Crazy, beautiful.

I’m back

Posted on March 8, 2011 by ElliotOwl

Finally back on this space.

I’ve spent the last two to three months travelling quite extensively. My body has had to adjust to about ten different timezones in a span of about nine weeks. Not very fun. On the flipside, I’ve met so many great people and done so many amazing things in such a short time, I really can’t complain.

Some of the things I’ve gotten up to since November:

I seriously considered a career in screenwriting. A very dear friend of mine was/is adamant that I would make a great screenwriter. He is one of the most intelligent and creative people I’ve ever met, and I hold his opinion in high regard – even if he thinks that I don’t, sometimes. I’ve never written for the screen before, so I was a little apprehensive. In spite of that, I took up a refresher screenwriting course and got my nose into some really great books. That opened up a whole new world for me, as I began to discover a new way to look at and create stories. I found a few amazing resources that really helped me out and I consumed voraciously; absorbing and committing to memory every word. I flew up to LA in January 2011 with news that I might get a chance to meet a “hotshot TV guy” to make some beautiful TV babies together. Things didn’t quite work out as I’d expected, but I wasn’t disappointed at all. The fact that I was even offered a chance in the holy grail of film/TV was proof enough that I might actually have a shot at this industry – something I had only considered a “hobby” right up to that point. I like keeping my options open, and adding another potential career path to the mix wasn’t a bad thing at all.

From LA, I made my way to San Francisco, then to New York. I spent most of my time travelling alone, and making friends with some of the most interesting people. I am an awful, awful tourist. I have just about zero interest in visiting your standard tourist spots. I didn’t visit the Empire State Building, I didn’t stand on the Golden Gate Bridge, I barely spent any time on Hollywood Boulevard. Instead, I spent most of my time sitting in cafes and bars, having random conversations, talking about our lives and spilling secrets the way you can with a perfect stranger you’ll probably never meet again in your life. In San Francisco, I met an English girl who was on a six month travel sabbatical after she found her boyfriend in bed with her best friend. She regretted packing six Lonely Planet guidebooks instead of bringing a little WiFi friendly netbook with her. In Harlem, New York, I met a guy who plays bass in a great funk/soul band. He invited me to come watch his band play in a cute little bar, and we got drunk on cheap whiskey and bar nuts. In Los Angeles, I met a South African girl who had just been kicked out of her boyfriend’s house. She was a full-time au pair and loved drinking iced tea. I don’t remember any of their names, but it really doesn’t matter, and that certainly wasn’t the point.

A blizzard in New York delayed my flight to Japan, which in turn made me miss my connecting flight back to Singapore. I ended up spending a completely unplanned 24 hours in Japan, which, in spite of being a fairly frequent traveller, I was completely unprepared for. Let’s just say that anything that could have possibly gone wrong, did go wrong, and I was basically stranded in Narita City in the middle of winter without a coat, hungry and completely penniless. I was surprised by how optimistic and upbeat I was through the entire experience/ordeal though, given how I love a good whinge at the slightest instance (I’m Singaporean, it’s programmed in our DNA). The best part of it was that I got to bring home a great story for friends and family, and anyone else who would care to listen.

Since all that, I’ve moved my arse back to Melbourne-town, and have been slowly trying to settle back down. Getting back to work, and trying to get back into the swing of things. On impulse, I’ve decided that maybe I need a change of pace, and so have been seriously considering moving my life up to Sydney. What’s there for me? Nothing, really. At this point, anyway. I don’t know anyone there, but really, it doesn’t matter. A(nother) fresh start is what I think I need at this point in my life, and this just seems like a great way to get into it. That would all probably explain why I haven’t completely unpacked my suitcase yet, and am only staying at a mate’s place “temporarily”. In the meantime, I’ve been getting in touch with some great minds in Sydney, begging for a job (I may blog about this later – the feedback I’ve gotten for my cover letter has been nothing short of interesting). As some of you might know, I have been freelancing the last few years, but feel that I am ready to step (back) into big agency life. I’m excited to see how things turn out in coming months. Stay tuned.

$0.00, the future of business

Posted on October 21, 2010 by ElliotOwl

Chris Anderson, also of Wired magazine, wrote a very interesting article about the business of “free”. He says, “Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy”. He attributes this to the falling costs of producing digital content.

“The Web is all about scale, finding ways to attract the most users for centralized resources, spreading those costs over larger and larger audiences as the technology gets more and more capable. It’s not about the cost of the equipment in the racks at the data centre; it’s about what that equipment can do. And every year, like some sort of magic clockwork, it does more and more for less and less, bringing the marginal costs of technology in the units that we individuals consume closer to zero.”

A fantastic example of this would be Radiohead’s album titled In Rainbows that was released in 2007. The band allowed their fans to pay any amount they liked. And yes, that also included $0.00. While official figures were never released by the band’s management, Owsinski’s book on Music 3.0 quoted market research company comScore’s findings to be: 48% of the downloads were paid for, 4% of which paid $20 (the retail cost of a CD) and 12% paid between $8 to $12. These are some pretty telling statistics, that remind us that the True Fan does exist.

In the article, he reminds us that offering a product (such as an audio file, in this case) for free does not mean that you have absolutely zero profits. Instead, he encourages us to consider the idea that providing something for free can lead to something else. Perhaps linking this to Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans Theory, Lesser Fans may be nurtured into True Fans by feeding them with free content; telling them that the artist cares about their fans by rewarding them for supporting their music.