On the 13th of July which was two weeks ago, I went to Bangsar to attend a public talk. A few days before that, I saw an advertorial that says “Here’s how you can get a job in advertising paying you a salary of RM2,300. Guaranteed.” The headline alone drew me to read the half a page content. The advertisement was from 95%: The Advertising Academy so it did a good job at making me notice and take action to come to their talk.

Since LV is a masscom student majoring in advertising, I brought her along as well just to give her some insight of what her future career will look like. I’ve already have a career but somewhere deep inside of me, I have a lot of interest in advertising. Eventhough I blew up some of my own advertising money during a few weeks of online advertising campaign I practiced a couple of years ago, I still think advertising has an endless bright future.

95% The Advertising Academy Office

A Scene Before The 95% The Advertising Academy Talk

The talk starts at 2.30pm so even though I was kind of late, I still managed to arrive there.

Janet Lee Giving A Speech

That’s Janet Lee, she’s one of the founder of 95% The Advertising Academy. They have their own blog here if you are interested to read what they are planning to do or what they have done so far.

The Welcome to Advertising Slide Show

The welcoming slide is rather simple but quite creative. If you cannot read what the fineprint is saying, it says “Say goodbye to dull and boring days”. Basically it was assuming that people who came there are looking for a career change and advertising are one of the industry that isn’t dull and boring.

One of the trainer at 95% The Advertising Academy

That’s Shaikh Shahnaz Karim. He was the one presenting the entire presentation to the audience. He was actually from the IT industry before he came into the advertising world which he finds it ‘colourful’. Now read this, the advertising industry is a RM5 BILLION industry in Malaysia alone. That’s a HUGE amount of money! Now look at this figure:

Number of advertising agencies in Malaysia

I think there are plenty of shares to have more advertising agencies in Malaysia for that RM5 billion advertising pie. That might be one of the reason 95 percent ad academy has come out with a program called Hydrogen. The program cost RM15,000 for 6 months but there is a screening before you are actually admitted into the program. They have 3 positions to be filled; 1)Copywriter 2)Strategic Planner 3)Account Executive. If I were to choose, I think I’ll go for copywriting since I like to play around with words.

95 percent Advertising Agency Hydrogen program

The best thing about the program is it is sort of like a crash course training twice during your weekdays evening and you are actually guaranteed a job. If I were looking for a job or a career change, I think this program is really worth it. Just think of the time you can save by leveraging through your mentor’s network and experience and you get paid on top of that. It’s a healthy investment. The advertising industry is the only industry that can connect and communicate with every industry available because of their excellent medium which is now become really targeted using Information Technology. Throughout the talk, they’ve shown us sample videos of advertisement from many different countries and which videos won the Kancil Awards and the Cannes Lions festival.

Then again, I’ve already found my career field which is currently in the IT solution and application. 95 % The Advertising Academy works closely with the Association of Accredited Advertising Agents Malaysia. You can check out their blog at http://enter95percent.blogspot.com/ or visit http://www.rise67.com to learn more about their program.

Two days after I went to Singapore, I headed down south again. This time, I had to drive my own car accompanied with a colleague of mine. I was lucky I managed to fill up my tank with a full tank of petrol the night before the price of petrol increased the day after. Unfortunately, I still have to claim back from my company the same mileage before the price hike.

Anyway, I drive off from Equine Park where my office is located at around 6am in the morning. The journey took 2 and a half hour with a maximum speed of 120km/h with my red Proton Iswara. I arrived at Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) Kampus Bandar at 8.40am just 20 minutes before my training session starts. I have never conducted any training session before, the closest I have done was organizing a training session so this would be a great experience.

There were 10 participants in my training class. The best thing about the class is how well the computer training lab at UTHM is equipped. The PC they have are all brand new Intel Core 2 processor with vPro technology. I wonder how much does it cost for just one desktop computer alone. Before the training started, we had an in-house “nasi lemak” breakfast and then to set up the network and computer for a localhost connection with Joomla.

The Computer Lab at UTHM

At first my partner suggested to install every PC that is going to be use with XAMPP. I insisted that we save up the time to install on every PC to only setup and install XAMPP on one host computer and the rest of the connection is pointed to that PC’s IP address. That would be easier to control and make it almost as the same as a live website. Unlike WordPress, the best thing about Joomla is the only setting that is needed to make the image, link and database connection is configurable at configuration.php file. After all that is done, I started the class with a brief introduction of why Joomla is suitable to handle a portal instead of a static HTML and the difference and similarities between a blog and Content Management System (CMS) website.

After lunch, sensing that the class was a bit bored over the technical jargon Joomla administration has, I organized an activity exercise which was a competition between the guys and the girls. The objective was to produce the most content entered and the best-looking website into a brand new empty Joomla system one. My partner facilitated the girl’s group while I handled the guy’s group. Obviously I helped the guy’s website look much more impressive than the girls since I know a lot of short-cuts and trade off of Joomla administration.

My objective before the class is to get the participant to grasp at least 50% of what I’ve taught them. From my observation, they have achieved it and I am quite happy about it. Overall, it was a good class and I’ve gained a lot of valuable experience which I couldn’t have got if I only keep the skills to myself.

The beginning of the week, my brother and I went to the American Embassy located at Jalan Ampang to apply for a Non-Immigrant Visa. It was just a short 20 minutes drive from my house. I arrived in front of the American Embassy guard house at 8.30am since I’ve already booked an 8.50am appointment:

In Front of KL US Embassy

The booking was done online here and I’ve already prepared all the necessary documents. Among them were:

• My Passport
• Alliance Bank Pay Slip
• The interview appointment letter
• Filled DS-156 form
• Filled DS-157 form
• An official employers letter verifying my employment
• My Itinerary
• My event schedule

I had to hand over my handphone since they don’t allow handphone inside the Embassy. There were two metal detector door which everybody have to go through. Took a queue number and waited inside the waiting room.

My American Embassy Queue Number

The Mistake

Half an hour later, it was my turn and I surrendered all the filled documents only to find that my photograph were wrong. It had a blue background. The grumpy Indian lady then handed me a yellow slip and asked me to go out and take a new photograph that has a white background. It was my fault of not reading the instruction properly and entrusted the girl at the photo shop of the colour of the background since I thought she had done it before. What a waste of RM18 for that photograph.

I then walked half a kilometer to Ampang Park to get a new photograph with a white background. I discovered that different Visa application photo had different requirement when the shop asked me which country I’m applying for my visa. That place was expensive because I had to pay RM10 for just 2 pieces of photo. I should have gone for other shop but that’s the only shop I found which was opened at 9.30am and I am in hurry to get back to the Embassy before 10.30am. Because of this mistake, I had to take another queue number and was among the last to finish the interview.

The Interview

I lost track of the waiting time already, when my turn is up after gotten my fingerprints into their system, I was interviewed by an American lady. She asked about my company and why am I going to the US. I explained briefly about my company and the reason which was to attend a product update training, a business partner meeting and a conference. She then proceed and asked about my previous employment , my salary and my current job position. It was kind of lengthy (which my brother find odd since his interview was short) but of course I had to endure it.

She then told me the result of the interview, I was only granted a one time visit to the US. She elaborated on the reasons; it’s my first time going out of the country, I have to build more reputable career line (I guess she saw me as a job hopper) and I need to build more credibility on my profile. I almost argued with her but she said she could have refused my application but didn’t want to because she’s giving me a chance. I had to calm down after that because it would be difficult for me on my next application if my paperwork had some negative mark on it.

The validity period is only 6 months (it’s more than what my brother got last time-3 months) and once I stepped into the US, my visa will lose its validity.

The Disappointment

It was rather disappointing the fact that all my effort to get my passport done, getting my US Visa and all the additional hours of doing travelling research went pointless as there was a change of decision in my company’s management. I appreciated my boss for letting me know earlier that there was a slim chance of the travel trip would have to be revoked. However a part of me was also relieved I didn’t make it for the trip since I haven’t prepared anything for my luggage and all the additional spending I had to bare for the preparation of the trip in such short notice.

Anyway, I treat everything that has happened in my life as a good experience and it would always be treasured in this blog to share with everyone.

I’m writing this post using my brand new upgraded WordPress 2.5 platform. I find it good enough although I do missed the big old dashboard that has all those big fonts. Anyway, last week Thursday night there was another webinar which I’ve forgotten that I’ve already signed up to attend it online. I just realized about it the last minute when I suddenly received a reminder e-mail just before the online webinar was about to start.

Since the webinar was organized by Citrix, the organizer had everybody attending to install their software in order for them to show their presentation slides. Unfortunately, the audio is only accessible by dialing a toll free US number. Again, I used Skype for this purpose. It was interesting despite living in Malaysia, I have the same facility as what my counterpart in the US have. I just love being online on the World Wide Web. Here’s a screenshot of my desktop setup. (For those of you who like to analyze what type of person I am, you can see what application I have on my desktop as well *wink*)-

My Desktop Preview

I love how the Citrix online presentation flow was handled. I’ve been to a lot of presentation from my experience attending talks, seminars and webinars and normally I can spot which presentation can attract my interest. This one, eventhough I can’t see the speaker’s face, the presentation style is quite good plus there wasn’t so much of a hard selling effort. Here’s an interesting slide I’ve taken from my desktop screenshot while hearing to the webinar:

Citrix Online Webcast

Last year in December, I attended an online presentation meeting with a Canada based company. They use Adobe Connect to perform their slideshows and again Skype as the main audio communicator. That was my first time I’ve ever experienced a one to one online sales presentation and it opened my eyes to a whole lot more the usability of the web. I recorded everything using Camtasia software for my keeping.

An interesting perspective here is, not everybody is exposed to this new technique of doing demo presentation live on the internet. It might be useful at some point but there is so many technical aspect to take care of, at least initially. Anyway, the future of doing web conferencing online looks quite promising and I do look forward paying attention to it very closely.