Stay Hungry Stay Foolish

Big people have big dreams and small people have small dreams. If you want to change who you are, begin by changing the size of your dreams- Robert Kiyosaki

Having big dreams in life is important. Big dream means you are setting a high goal in your life.You will not afraid to try and taking opportunities in front of you. You will not afraid to fail and learn from your mistakes.You will take risks and work hard to achieve your goal.

However, I also realize that many of us are not strong enough to hold on to our dreams.  Many of us don’t even have the courage to become big dreamers and too afraid to make mistakes.  Many of us forget our dreams and as the day go by, letting go our dreams washed away by routinity of life.

Since I was younger, I am having this  dream to meet new people from around the world, sharing thoughts and go to many places. I felt that my world is so small and I believe that world is much more bigger than what i know and has so many things to offer. I have this curiosity to explore and learn new things which I believe will makes me stronger and wiser as a person.

Asking my Mom to pay for it is definitely not an option, so back then I tried other way to achieve it.  And this is what I did

At the age of 19, I selected as the 1st winner of the international essay competition for young people held by the Goi Peace Foundation Japan compete against 5,254 entries from 109 countries. I was giving speech in front of ambassadors and students at Tokyo. My essay and thought about dream and hope for the future of the world is heard by multicultural people.

It didn’t happen in a blink of an eye though. I’ve tried several times to submit my writings to competitions before and as I think about it now, I guess I achieved it because I’ve tried so hard and I want it so badly.

Looking at those pictures above, it feels like it was a very long time a go and somehow I barely known myself. Now I am 26, it’s been 7 years a go and I don’t where my never-give-up spirit has gone away

The passions and dreams, I know it’s still there, but the spirit to achieve it is buried by routinity and the busy of day to day life. Routinity I think, can be a dangerous element which can washed away your dreams. Time flies, so fast. You won’t realize it’s already years and you are still standing on the same place and you start losing you way.

So dream big.  Dream something which is good for yourself and your society.
Setting up your dreams is very important
But continuously act to achieve it, is much more important.

And once you have, don’t ever give up on it and never let it go.

All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them – Walt Disney

I went to Bangkok with the girls last year, but just got the chance to post the story now (ah yes, very very late indeed).

Anyway, Í’d like to share because it was really fun! The trip had been planned few months before because we booked on Air Asia promo flight

We were staying at Bangkok from 19 – 23 May 2009. We arrived at night and checked in at Suk 11 hostel at 1/13 Sukhumvit 11. The hostel was nice, affordable and most importantly, it was clean.  The hotel location was walking distance from the Skytrain (BTS) station, the nearest one is Nana station. Four of us staying at family room which is quite large.

Arrived at Bangkok and checked in at Suk 11. The hostel has traditional style and dominated by wood.

This is the room where we were staying (family room type) -  1 double and 3 single beds

The next day, our first destination was to explore all the temples in Bangkok. We traveled by BTS to the boat station then continue by the long-tail boat to the Grand Palace. I think this would be the easiest way if you want to see the temples, because the temples were located along the Chao Phraya River and boat/ferries can be used to cross the river at various points.

The long-tail boat or locally called as hang yao. You don’t have to buy admission ticket (like a package ticket, some local people will offer this to you) instead you can treat it like bus (you pay based on your pier destination)

It wasn’t hard to travel in Bangkok compared to Jakarta. I found it much more convenient and organized. It didn’t take long until we arrived at the pier to the Grand Palace. We need to walked only few minutes to reach the Grand Palace gate. Please bare in mind Grand Palace is a huge temples area, so you need to wear comfortable clothes and shoes. Consider bringing hat as well to protect your head from the heat. You better go early because it opens from 8:30 to 3:30, daily and do dress properly (covered shoulders, no bare legs, shoulders or feet – both men & women). They checked you at the entrance and will deny entry. There was a place near the entrance you can borrow (I think around 200 baht deposit) proper clothing (similar to some places in Bali).

View not far from the entrance gate. The temples are really beautiful. You’ll see gold everywhere. We took so much photos at Grand Palace

You can see many temples in Grand Palace, and then you can also travel by long-tail boat the the surrounding temples such as Wat Arun (Temple of Dawn) or the famous Wat Pho (Temple of Reclining Buddha). This is must-visited spot in Bangkok, especially for the first time trip.

Wat Pho (Temple of Reclining Buddha)

Done with the temples, we went to Khao San Road. This Road is famous as a  backpacker area, so you can see many tourist here. There are lots of hostel and restaurants. We just had drinks and chat for a while here and then continued our journey to the Suan Lum Night Market.

Khao San Road – a small road located about a block from the Chao Phraya River. Known as famous “backpacker ghetto”. Khao San Road is Bangkok’s main backpacker guesthouse centre and you can find  plenty of shops and diverse food selections

Suan Lum Night Bazaar. We had dinner here and of course did some shopping! It sells gifts, clothing, jewelery, hand-made products like tapestries and fine arts, such as paintings and sculptures. Price are negotiable.

So that’s it for the first day! So happy and tired.

Next day, we woke up early, quickly had breakfast at hostel then off to Ananta Samakhom Throne Hall.  It was a museum and the building in Italian Renaissance and Neo Classic style. The building itself is really cool but no picture are allowed inside. Inside the museum you can see scluptures and I think some jewelry collections. It was not so interesting to me so I didn’t remember it well.

Ananta Samakhom Throne Hall. No pictures are allowed inside.

To my suprise, Ananta Samakhon Throne Hall is not the only museum in the complex. It is actually a wide area where you can see other museums. We visited Vimanmek Palace which is much more memorable for me. Visitors divided into groups and the tour guide explained the history of each area of the palace. The palace is pretty and each area has different colors such as pink, blue, green etc.  The rooms are so beautiful, with all the details inside such as cups, tables, bed, carpet and so on. Well, no picture allowed as well however.

After palace, we went to Baiyoke Sky Hotel, which was said as the tallest building in Bangkok.  You need to pay certain amount of baht (not remember) and then you can go to the upper building by direct lift (it made me shiver). We were having drinks there and taking pictures from the rooftop where we can see all the Bangkok city landscape.

Baiyoke Sky Hotel. See Bangkok landscape from the tallest building in town.

After Baiyoke, we decided to go back to the hotel because we planned to watch Cabaret show at night. Looking for Cabaret ticket is easy,  just go the travel, they usually sell it or alternatively you can buy directly on the venue. There are few Cabaret shows you can pick, the one that I saw, which is great is Calypso Cabaret. The performers are pretty (yes they are all male) and the show was great!

With one of the Cabaret performers at Calypso Cabaret Show

We ended the day by having dinner at Banyan Tree Rooftop. This is a place for roof-top fine dining.  The view was magnificent. There’s also a bar where you can spend the whole night long.  Very very recommended!

The Banyan Tree Roof-top bar. The view was magnificent from up here. Perfect to spend the whole night long

Us at The Banyan Tree Roof-Top

So that’s all for the second day!

The next day was the whole day of a shopping day. Platinum is a must-visit shopping place for every woman. The price is cheap and the clothes are nice. We also went to Siam Paragon, having waffle there after shopping. Done with all the shopping we went back to the hotel and went out for dinner. Curious of Pat Pong area, we went there – walk once into the street, buying Thai Ice Tea on the mini market in the neighbourhood then left because we afraid of some guys inviting us to the show.

On the last day, we went to Chatu Chak until noon because we need to be in the airport around 5pm. You can find almost everything in here, I bought foods, old bands T-shirts, leather shoes,  gift for people at home. The market is so big but divided into sections (food, clothes, gift etc).  It’s nice eventhough the weather was so hot that I got dizzy.

Some antiques at Chatu Chak market. Wear your most comfortable clothes and shoes.

So I think that’s all for our trip to Bangkok!
It was fun and great. I saw new things and beautiful places.

Can’t wait for my next trip exploring new areas!

Trendwatching is one of my must-read- site. It gives some interesting ideas of consumer trends from around the world. Not all necessary relevant to Indonesia, but enough to give a glance about what’s on out there.

They just released these videos.Pretty interesting.

What makes you happy?

Car vs Phone

Who Cares?

The future of consumerism

Dreamland – Bali Indonesia. 05 December 2009.

I was staying at Bali Ayu Hotel at Seminyak. Very recommended! It has Bali architecture and style, clean at a very affordable rate. Beside beaches, I also went to Monkey Forest at Ubud, visiting Indonesia Cartoon Museum at Kuta and Agung Rai Museum of Art (ARMA)

At the entrance of Agung Rai Museum of Art. Not allowed to take photos inside.

Having fun while working. It’s what everybody should do, so no one become too stressed and got into hospital. During job assignment in Bali, here are my top list of having fun :

1. Sea Walker
If you haven’t try this, try it! It’s pretty cool. As stated in the name, Sea Walker means we are walking at the bottom of the sea, wearing this big oxygen helmet which is quite heavy. But that’s fine because you are going  to see the beauty of the sea. Yes, you’ll see those fishes and few corals .You can give food so the fish will come to you. The Sea Walker last for less than 30 minutes. And if you want to be photographed like mine below, you’ll need to pay around IDR 115,000. Walking at the bottom of the sea makes your steps slower, like a snail. You need to stick within your group, which usually consists of 6 people.

hello starfishes!

2. Kecak Dance
I always love Bali culture, especially the dances. I love seeing kecak dance at Ubud with the sunset background. It’s amazingly pretty. This time, we hired a complete team of Kecak dancers to entertain the winners during the dinner at the hotel. The dance was great,  though I still prefer seeing their performance at Ubud.

3. Taking Pictures
This is my first trial using Canon D50. At the last day, we went to Dreamland to see the sunset. It was pretty. I saw this cute little girl and her dad playing on the beach. By the sunset, both were standing still and staring at the orange sky.

4. Delicious Seafood
I am a seafood addict.  It was the dinner on the second day and I ate crabs like crazy at Jimbaran. The food from the winner’s cooking class below were also yummy!

5. Yoga by the beach
I’m not really into Yoga, but to replace one of the media person, I joined the female team for Yoga class in the morning. My plus points will be the Yoga teacher and the sea view. Imagine doing Yoga with the sound of the wave and the wind slowly blowing through your skin. Perfect!

Nusa Dua, Ubud, Dreamland  – Bali Indonesia. Oktober 2009

I always feel that tickle on my stomach when I get the chance to learn new knowledge in online & digital marketing. And this is one of it.

So my boss was calling from SG and asked me to join the Omniture SiteCatalyst Training. This is the web analytic tool used by a  client of us.  The training was 2 days and it was introduction on how to use & read the SiteCatalyst dashboard.

I arrived on 18th of Aug, checked-in to Park Royal hotel which is only 10 minutes walking distance from the office. I arrived around 4pm, put my stuff and went to the office which is located on the Beach Road  at The Concourse building. Similar to the Jakarta , Wunderman’s office is on the same floor with Y&R  and Landor- but of course with much more bigger space.

Wunderman Regional HQ Office – Singapore

So the 1st day was casual introduction and chat with my boss over the coffee at Starbucks downstairs.  I got back to hotel around 6pm and i went out for dinner after. On the way back home, passed by the office and let myself took picture.

The Coucourse Building – Singapore

On the next day, I met with a colleague in front of the office and went to the training venue. (Group M office). The training was like a workshop class.  We should bring our laptop and need to open the Site Catalyst’s dashboard then follow the presenter’s explanation.

The training class room (Group M office)

It’s pretty interesting. As we know, the beauty of digital marketing is that you can measure the effectiveness. But then, we need to understand what is actually we want to measure and what’s the KPI (key performance indicators). As the marketing spend on digital is rising,  analytics are still the least understood and most poorly used part of a campaign (Digital Media – media.asia Summer 2010)

Web analytics will help you to answer how to performance of you site and how to optimize it. Further more, it is the measurement of the behavior of visitors to a website, in a commerical context, it especially refers to the measurement of which aspect of the website work towards the business objective e.g which landing page encourage people to make a purchase

I won’t go into details what’s the features of SiteCatalyst, the manual book itself has hundreds of pages and 2 days training won’t be sufficient. Simply said, it can measure from traffic metrics (page views, visits, unique visits, path analysis, video, mobile traffic) also conversion metrics (purchase, cart, registrations, report-specific metrics). It can also automatically calculate your ROI (return of investment) if you have defined the cost and what to measure in the dashboard.

But I think, what most importantly needs to be done is below steps of using analytics which still rarely implemented here :

This is also the way to define whether a campaign is success or fail, which one is more efficient and that means knowing what works at what time and investing accordingly.

There’s much more about analytics and reports. Digital is increasingly about data, owning it, interpreting it and leveraging it.  Marketers can be overwhelmed by the sea of data, but it is actually really interesting to get all the insights and so you know deeper about the customer behavior and most importantly, invest smartly.

This early Sept, I was joining Young Spikes Asia 2009. Young Spikes Asia is a competition for young creative people (under 28) to create an in integrated marketing communication which is engaging & able to answer the brief in 48 hours. We don’t compete individually, but in a team which consist of 2 to 4 people.

In national scale, the committee is Femina Group.  The winner of Young Spike Asia Indonesia will go to Singapore to compete with other finalists to become the ultimate winner. So the brief for the national competition was like this :

Client : YL GN-OTA
Campaign obejctive : To show to people that by participating in GN-OTA they can make a difference to the future; be it the children’s future, nation’s future, or their own future.
Desired response : I realize now that how small my contribution is, it will have a big impact to the future of the nation.
Tone & Manner : positive approach,heart warming
Do & Dont’s : Low budget campaign, do not exploit poverty, associate with zakat,crime and political issues

By the time I received the brief (yep – i received the brief alone) I didn’t have team yet. My office mate mostly above 28 and the office workload is also crazy at that time. Until finally, I teamed up with cross agencies guys  (arc worldwide & a freelancer).

The short time to answer the brief made us awake the whole night. By almost midnight, I came up with the thinking that Indonesian need a movement to encourage them to donate and so we finalize that the idea.  So here it is:

Insights : Over the years Indonesians have seen too much poverty, protests, crime, violence and recently bombing which hit us again for several times. We’ve seen our nations facing multidimensional issues and problems thus creating discourage feeling among Indonesians. We start to doubt for better change, questioning the future of our nations and at the end wondering “does any of my acts can make any difference in these complicated situation?

Solution : Indonesians need resurrection. A strong collective movement! A momentum!

The core Idea : Ambil Peranmu! (Take Your Part!) It’s a collective movement where Indonesians are encouraged to donate & become foster parents. Total donation should reach 1 billion in 1 month to help 5,000 children for 1 year education. An interactive billboard showing real updates of donation collected will be placed in strategic spots.

Key communication channel : Interactive billboard – supported by digital, on ground activation, offline viral tools, PR, radio & CRM.

and few minutes before the deadline, thankfully we were able to handed over our proposal to the committee!

THE GOOD NEWS!

Saturday noon, committee called and informed that we were one of the total 7 finalists! We will present our proposal in front of the judges! Saturday night, we hang out at Mcdie discussing presentation flow & divided the job task. Sunday night, we awake the whole night and day, practicing the presentation flow :

Myself : opening, objective, market insights, the idea, communication phases, offline viral tools, PR, digital & 121 communications.
Rangga : will focus on the ground activation & radio, pin distribution
Damas : interactive billboard – he’s the ice-breaker part  & will present in elementary school uniform

BIG DAY IS COMING!
Sleepy but excited, we got number 6 to present.  Turned out we were the team who brought the most equipment (we brought mock-up of interactive billboard, which is quite huge). We also made the T-shirt. It was so fun! The presentation went well, and I know we did our best. Below our faces right after the presentation :

AND THE BAD NEWS!

Yes, we didn’t win. The winning team was from Ogilvy. I wish them luck and hope they can championed the regional competition. However, it was so fun!  and none can buy the experience and learning!

Steve Jobs speech on Standford’s commencement in 2005. Posted below the video – hope you found it as inspiring as I do.