Psychographic Profile: I am an Advertising Student

Let’s get vida and take photos of each other and deep etch them.

i am an advertising student.
i go to red and yellow / triple A / Vega.
i think my school is better than all the others.
i am from Joburg, but i am reinventing myself in Cape Town.
i am open-minded and quirky.
my accent has an American twang that i picked up from my best friend MTV / VH1.

I am an advertising student.
i carry at least 2 moleskines everywhere i go (1 for ideas, 1 for doing sketches of my friends that i will scan later and upload onto facebook so my friends can use them as profile pics).
i am learning to manipulate the minds of the public.
i am learning how to render food, cars and fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) with my overpriced Copic Markers.
i am adding ppl who work at ad agencies as friends of facebook because it will improve my peer evaluation marks.

i am an advertising student.
i have loads of cool kreative friends at AFDA.i have slept with all of them.
all of them have slept with me.
we do cocaine together at mercury live.
together we are ‘singing the song, singing this is the life’.
i write scripts and we make short films about the role brands play in our lives.
i work for the man. i hate the man. fuck the man. i am the man.
i make out with my female classmates when i go out to Long Street on a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night.
i am in love with my gay best friend.

i am an advertising student.
i am multitalented. i can write and i can draw.
i can direct short movies on my nokia.
i know how to work a “Mac”.
i am in love with ideas.
i am just an idea. you are just an idea.
together, we have both been done before.

i am an advertising student.
someday i will be an advertising intern.
someday i will sleep with a Creative Director and blackmail him into hiring me.
someday i will write / art direct / design a TV ad / billboard / radio ad / brochure / promotion / meme that your kids will hum along to / fwd on email / fwd on Mxit / fwd on facebook.
someday i will quit my successful job and go ‘work in Dubai’ to kick my cocaine addiction.
someday i will never quit smoking, even though i did that ad about smoking that makes you puke into your mouth.

i am an advertising student.
i take pictures of the nightlife and upload them on my blog.
i work on proactive campaigns for brands like Vespa and Pritt glue.
i earn money by working behind the bar at a nightclub / at Exclusive Books / for a market research company.
i collect scraps of paper / packaging / stickers / quotes and stick them up around my desk / bedroom to feel creative / stimulate my mind.
i go to Vida E Caffe at wembley square every saturday morning so i can see Waddy Jones and his wife drink coffee and write raps.

i am an advertising student.
i go to vortex on the weekends. i dance to the trance music.
i love the vort because i can forget about brands and just ‘let loose’ and ‘be myself’.
i only read wallpaper and monocle magazine because i am progressive and have a global perspective.
i have won a student loerie.
i will get the funnest job at the zaniest agency because of it.

i am an advertising student.
i am my own consumer promise.
this is my tone and manner.
this is my substantiating evidence.
buy into my communication strategy.
buy into me.
buy me.

sticking to the rules. blogging through the storm.

trying not to ‘not blog’, but amount of work in system at the moment is not very accommodating when it comes to doing anything save shovel piles of sand on the flames to keep it from igniting into a furnace that turns me into a ghost who haunts the person who receives my corneas after they get transplanted. you know things are really bad when i start referencing jessica alba movies. rei and i watched ‘the eye’ last night. very jumpy. very freaky. not great since have just recovered from a stephen king novel, and was then subjected to ‘supernatural’ on tv the night before last, and then more malicious paranormal shadows in ‘the eye’.

Me dressed up as a paranormal shadow.

been reading stephen king because i have this great idea for a thriller/horror, and i wanted to learn from him since he manages to make quite un-scary and tame monsters heeb and jeeb the smug out of you. boy did i learn. i had a horrible nightmare, so horrible i gathered together all my crystals and placed them in a triangle around my bed so as to deflect any kind of night terrors that might come creeping. fat lot of good it did since i then dreamt that my foot had been chopped off and i found it at the bottom of the virgin active swimming pool, and spent the rest of the nightmare trying to find someone who could take me to hospital (my gran wasn’t sympathetic, my mom had something else to do and my brother accused me of only phoning him when i need something). Rei suggested that i probably stuck my leg out off the bed and my foot exceed the crystal triangle, thus i dreamt it got cut off. which is nauseatingly plausible.

on another note, new party COPE do have a logo / look and feel. not sure i like it. i feel like these super saturated colours are a bit tired. i know it’s supposed to reflect africa and the heart and vibrancy of african people, but i wish politicians would have a little sympathy for our eyes. you gotta think of your rallies. you’re going to have a lot of people wearing shirts the colour of a fast-ripening banana. fast-ripening banana has never been a colour synonymous with progress or revolution. wish the designer working on this would go back to tech and redo their guache colour charts.

I can almost smell banana smell.

i do quite like the star vibes though. reminds me of a colourful diamond. i feel like i could vote for a party like this because diamonds remind me of kanye west (I’m not a businessman i’m a business, MAN) and i would be totally cool with kanye west being the president of southafricanland. he’d definitely have more interesting tunes that that dude who sings the song about his machine gun. not sure how you guys feel about an artist that releases and performs only one song over and over. he definitely doesn’t deserve any awards from MTV, you know what i’m saying?

If Kanye deigned to sing a song about bringing him a gun am pretty sure it would be something like 'bring me my tazer lazer ripper, yo'.

If Kanye was president of South Africa he'd give the police these rad shutter shades which would enable them to see through table tops to what the dodgy politicians were doing beneath them. Bet he could see all the stuff that's been hidden under the carpet, too.

If Kanye West was president of SA he would provide free pool education to all children so that they could snooker their way above the breadline as opposed to killing people for their cellphones.

anyways will get back to blogging for realz when this big project comes through. shouldn’t be long now. in the meantime i’ll try update my status on facebook more often since then you can feel like me and you are BFFs and be there for me during the hard times.

book review: Design – a Tom Peters essential

my mom bought me this book. she doesn’t work in design and never has so she is forgiven. I’ve been reading it to get some outsider perspective on design for a job I’m working on.

Even though Tom believes design is at the heart of business, he doesn't seem to think people judge a book by its cover. Which is why he designed it himself. In PowerPoint.

The Economost calls him ‘The Uber-Guru’, so he must be worthy of some sort of worship. His writing, not so much. The content is not that bad – his sentiment is actually good. He elaborates on Design being the new currency, the only point of differentiation in business these days. Which is true.

But the fact that every second word is either bold or in italics serves to only emphasise my slight stigmatism.  It’s filled with little boxes that says things like “We are A-L-L designers”. Tom likes to spell things out. To help you see what I mean I have taken some photos.

I think what Tom is trying to do is emphasise the word "all". He really means it.

Just in case you thought it said "Design is why I get rad. R-A-D."

"Take note all you young 'uns who spell this word L-U-V."

Tom also uses quite a few inverted commas, which results in me wondering just what it is he R-E-A-L-L-Y M-E-A-N-S.

Is he referring to something else by putting dreams in "inverted commas"? Is this a code? What could "dreams" stand for? Is Tom being ironic? After a good 10 minutes thought along these lines, i finally turned the page. Defeated.

If someone asked me who I was, I would naturally think they were referring to who I am - these days. But now Tom's pulling a fast one on me again - should one be thinking about who one was, or who one is yet to be, when one is asked the question, "Who are you?" Have I been answering this question wrong all along, telling people I am a design writer from Cape Town when I should be telling them about one of my other lives as a slave in borneo? Will anyone ever really know the answer to this question?

The following page stopped me in my speed-reading tracks. My twitching eyes were drawn to a US Marshall’s sheriff badge. What could that possibly be doing in here? I wondered. And then I read the words underneath the badge.

Design cops! What a brilliant I-D-E-A! I feel "inspired". I suspect they might do the kind of job a Creative Director might do, but it's the cop part I'm so down with. I'm considering getting a badge for my boss to wear.

I don’t think I could with good conscience recommend this book. The layout and design alone might take your genetic predisposition to epilipsy and turn it into a thriving condition. I do, however, appreciate Tom Peters’s passion for and belief in design as the way forward for business, even though I wonder why a designer wasn’t employed to make the book walk the walk. Hell, what am I saying. They probably did have a designer, but he was just so damn scared of those design cops that this was the best they could get out of him once they’d managed to coax him out of his lift shaft hidey hole.

Moxyland Soundtrack Album – out now

i got this as a birthday gift from the author, amongst many fabulous gifts, but i am very excited about it. i’ve never heard of a book being released with a sound track, let alone a south african work of fiction. apparently you can buy them with the book in store. i’ve included a back pic so you can see which tracks are on it. am happy to see super evil’s there – it is iconic as far as original music goes in cape town. i particularly love the THIS IS NOT DEMOCRACY hidden in the clip in the jewel case. cover design by SA designer Dale Halvorsen.