25 Days Later . . .

Twenty-five days ago I wrote a post about a novel-length project I was undertaking and how I was planning to stick to a new writing strategy, detailed in a post before that. This post focused on writing quotas and the optimum time of the day during which one should write, in order to generate the most creativity. The image from the first post is below, showing how many words I had written of the novel thus far (in about 3 weeks.)

Before . . .

I gave myself -as you can see from the image- 25 days to complete a first draft, which I estimated to be at 70,000 words in length (sadly I overestimated this, but plan on fleshing out areas that I feel require such treatment) by writing 2200 words each and every day, as well as reading for at least one hour every day, a hobby that I am sustaining in the quite limited time that I have. Below is a new image that shows my progress.

After!

 I reached the ending -which I had already written- two nights ago, improving some areas and adding some scenes that provided a connection to the rest of the novel, given that when I had written the ending I had began right in the middle of the action, to keep myself interested and then wrote a plan around that before writing forward. I've found this a very useful strategy because when I wrote my first novel (currently in second-drafting stage) I hit walls constantly, and usually found myself subject to Writer's Block. in the entire course of this novel, I'm glad to report that only ONCE did I find myself staring at a blank screen unable to write anything in an evening. To give some context to the great progress this is for me, the post that I wrote announcing the completion of my first novel was entitled "700 Days Later . . ." which just highlights how slow I was, writing from August 2011 to July 2013, when the post was published. I'm also glad to say that as far as writing quality is concerned and plotting, this was a much better first-time effort! Time to improve!

PS. I'm also working on planning long-length ideas so that I don't end up forgetting them as soon as I go to sleep. Some are SF works whereas others are more mainstream (like this one.) I'll update on my work more in the future but until then, thanks for reading!

Carat Media Internship: Journal Entry #18

This week was more of the same initially, completing spend checks for a few campaigns, some government-based, others being those of private companies, but I was glad to see that they were all pacing quite well in general. Using these completed spend checks I went on to carry out some more site transparency reports and later I actually pulled the spend check from a Google-based DSP, which was a new experience. It was quite frustrating initially to be honest as I kept on trying to pull a spend check, but because Google requires you to tick boxes in order to show spend and the other metrics, in addition to selecting a time range i.e. "last 30 days" etc., this created some problems and so I ended up only pulling the data I needed on the third attempt, because I kept forgetting to tick all the relevant boxes, sometimes wondering which ones to tick. But it's still a lesson learned I guess and I did get what I needed without help in the end, so overall: Success!

One of My Better Presentations 

This was followed up with aiding in the design of another presentation focused on the engineering sector, highlighting the benefits of the social media platforms, obviously tailored to their requirements etc. I must also say here that I am really starting to get to grips with using PowerPoint creatively, which is a great deal better than just putting together the kinds of presentations I did at school, that pale in comparison quite frankly. In any case the presentation came out fine, I was asked for feedback before the end of the day actually, with the only criticisms being in certain misplacements of text boxes etc. that unbalanced the layout from time to time, problems that could be solved in next to no time, which was quite pleasing.

How You Can Target via Mobile Devices; 

(I gathered each image separately)

Finally, I aided another colleague in taking notes on LinkedIn as a potential platform, though I got no further than he did in discovering anything particularly new or exciting, it was still an experience (it reminded me of when I used to work for Tomi Clothing actually) and I did learn something about how LinkedIn do business with media buyers, their rates and costs etc., so hopefully such information will come in handy at some point in the future. 

Aside from this there isn't much else to say and so with this conclusion I will see you next week and hope that yours goes well in the meantime; I will hopefully be engaging with the DSPs that I have little experience of currently, so let's see how I fare!

The Bridge (Book Review)

Iain Banks' third book, published in 1986 (a year before his first Culture novel,) is an interesting journey to say the least, but a vortex of pure artistry at best. A witty, clever read that is genuinely funny and enthrallingly original, fun yet serious and vibrant yet inert. The story follows that of an amnesiac man, trapped in a coma as he tries to discover the hidden secrets of the Bridge, a world that rests on a perpetual suspension bridge between two locations, the full purpose and meaning of which he is unaware of. The story could be described as a comedy, a thriller or a love story all at once, with each part of the novel broken into four chapters, preceded by a 'stage' of sorts such as "Metamorphosis" or "Metamorpheus," charting the journey of three protagonists who represent traditional Freudian psychological concepts, including the ID, Ego and Superego with astounding skill.

The story is not what I'd describe as complex necessarily, but rather grand and encapsulating, fitting together neatly with immense satisfaction. His prose is crisp and the overlap with his Culture novels is quite a treat for anyone who has read his SF stuff, (a barbarian with a knife-missile, now that's original!) with references made to literature and poetry which, to those familiar, also evokes a few laughs along the way. The novel is strange, exciting and the dialogue -as one comes to expect from Banks- is lifelike and seamless and it's from these aspects that I -as a budding writer- have learnt so much. His ability to take the first-person and make him unique and -simultaneously- completely disparate from Banks as the writer is top-notch, which is why I imagine Iain considered the novel to be his best, describing it as "...the intellectual of the family... the one that went to university and got a first."

The protagonists are very different people and their mannerisms reflect this, but some of the best narration comes from the character of the Barbarian, whose Glaswegian voice and dialect is rendered with perfect skill, enunciated with every purposeful mis-spelling and solidified by every utterance, underpinned by ID typicalities found within Psychoanalysis. These chapters chart an unforgettable journey of delightful oddities, brim-filled with humour and socio-political commentary that one can match with Banks' own rather easily, summing up his personal dislike of the Thatcher government of the 1980s, without it taking the centre stage but more to the point summing up anti-Tory sentiments in Scotland generally, both back in those days and still to extents, today.

An exuberant, fantastical ride of the greatest imagination, The Bridge is Banks' ode to the memory and what it feels like to simply forget, and whether or not the dream is in fact better than reality.

The Bridge: 2013 Edition

Cloud Atlas (Book Review)

It's been a while since I reviewed a book but this one deserves such treatment, if for nothing else than the fact that it is truly epic in almost every sense of the word. David Mitchell's 2004 Booker Prize nomination (his second, including number9dream in 2001,) is a collection of six unique novelettes, split up and thrown together in weaving halves, to create a humorous, painful, joyous, light and indeed at times, dark boomerang through time and space, to present to us a magnificent opus, summing up everything good about the written word under the sun. Such plaudits from the press as "A magnificent feast" (The Times) and "An extraordinary narrative" (The Spectator) do not even begin to describe the diversity of Mitchell's stellar writing here, so much so that -as one reviewer pointed out in The New York Times, I think- there's just too much to talk about; but for what I hope will be your pleasure, I will try.

So where do we begin? Well first of all I'll break the story down into its separate chunks so that you can visualise the 'boomerang' of a narrative that takes us to the future and back again:

1- The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (set in the 1800s)

2- Letters from Zedelghem (set in the 1930s Belgium) 

3- Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (set in the US 1975)

4- The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (set in contemporary England)

5- An Orison of Somni-451 (set in a Corpocracy in North Korea some time in the near future)

6- Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After (A far-future dying Earth narrative)

5- An Orison of Somni-451 (Conclusion)

4- The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (Conclusion)

3- Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (Conclusion)

2- Letters from Zedelghem (Conclusion)

1- The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (Conclusion)

And ss you can see, the narratives offer something of a variety in their titles alone, but within each is a rich language, crafted and broken apart by Mitchell's talented hand and it is in the tranquility of the Pacific that we begin this awesome journey. The story here focuses on a man of the not-so-long-ago-formed United States, a man of letters writing of his experiences living amongst the tribes constantly at war with one another. His voice in the diary -almost a series of letters sent to us- carries with it a truly encapsulating tone and idiolect that reflects the time period in which is was supposedly written, so much so, that Mitchell has managed to create a very authentic account that, if it were not a work of fiction, could find itself in a museum as a historical artefact. What makes this narrative portion particularly interesting is that whenever swearing is presented in reported speech, Mitchell cleverly makes use of dashes to convey the fictitious author's opposition to what was at the time seen as much greater taboo than is the case today, with this idiosyncrasy also present when reporting statements that take the Lord's name in vain, again reflecting the time period with a consistent and unrelenting skill. This is the first microcosm of what the novel attempts to convey, that firstly, man tries to gather too much power over others to the extent that it consumes him and secondly, that history is connected and will repeat itself again and again.

We see the first example of the latter moral of the tale in the second story, set in the 1930s Belgium. An aspiring musician from Cambridge by the name of Robert Frobisher is seeking to work with a famed composer in the chateau of Zedelghem. This story is similar to the last, written not as a series of journal entries but rather a series of letters sent to an enigma named simply as "Sixsmith." He tells us of his life and times within the family of the composer, the feud with his spoiled daughter of the aristocracy and his affair with her mother, trying to keep himself scarce as he struggles and triumphs over the music he is creating, while at the same time is requesting of Sixsmith (we never see his letters of response) a rare book of historical significance named The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing. This story is one of conflict, feud, class, struggle and ultimately romance and it's effects on trust, which is again another cleverly-constructed example of how humanity is consumed by the power it seeks. An amazing feat that had already taken us forward in time and across the globe, we move on from the drama of Frobisher's musical life towards the political turmoil of nuclear power in the 1970s America.

This is the first real shift in the narrative where the writing is more orthodox, written like any other thriller, with short chapters and fast-paced scenes that rarely stop to give us a pretty picture of the world through the eyes of the protagonist, a journalist by the name of Luisa Rey. Half-Lives is probably one of my least-favourite sections of the novel, not because of any particular gripe but rather down to my personal taste for the other areas (my personal favourite being Zedelghem.) But nevertheless, the genre writing here is equally compelling as it had been previously, with the whole novel almost being written in quite short chapters, but those chapters taking different forms that make the whole work utterly unique, whether they be the short book-like chapters as seen here or letters sent to and from parties as seen previously. But above all else, this section is where the true meat of the end-game of the narrative, (chronologically ending mid-way through the work) comes into play: The rise to power of the corporation, which leads us to the next section of the novel where the cliff-hanger leaves us gasping for more as the air of suspense is whipped away from us at the last minute and instead is replaced by . . .

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. Tim's story focuses on a more lighthearted narrative that pokes quite tame fun at the grumpy old man stereotype, whilst taking us through a surreal story of a very strange kind of prison, which I will not spoil for you. The interesting thing about this is that -like how we met the character of Sixsmith in Half-Lives as an old man, we see the story of Luisa Rey in manuscript format, as our character thinks about it lying around amongst his possessions, casting a critical eye over the writing, wondering whether or not he should publish it. The character of Cavendish is revealed within his speech, with his dialect crisp and attitudes life-like, which makes him a marked contrast to Luisa and the characters before her, which begin to make this growing ensemble an interesting lot indeed. But the main selling point within this story is the humour. Humour at the stereotype conforming and then dismantling, humour at the predicaments of the characters and humour at the characters he meets on his journey, which came under fire by some critics with some arguing from a perspective of inconsistency. Me, well, I think personally the story was helped a great deal by this portion, because nobody wants to read a novel with such bleakness throughout every passage, which is why the comic relief was almost a signpost for me, an encouraging spark of light at the end of the tunnel, which forced me to carry on and in doing so I wound up in-

An Orison of Somni-451. While I feel as though I should point out that there is no connection other than the number to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit-451, there is indeed a genre overlap. The story is the first of two to be set in the future, a place known as 'Nea So Corpos' where clones are used in fast-food restaurants to serve the ignorant 'pureblood' populace. The story is told via a series of interview questions about a revolution asked by an archivist and directed at Somni herself, who was shown the light and as a result became sentient. This story is very interesting due to its use of almost Orwellian prose, with brand names becoming nouns for the very things in which they are dominant -an extreme form of brand eponyms: Brands used include fords (cars,) nikes (shoes) and exxon (oil or fuel,) which really heightens the sense of where power lies within this society, with suggestive cues such as describing the logo of the fast-food restaurant (known as 'Papa Sans') as golden arches, an obvious jab at the ubiquity of McDonalds. As a marketer this particular story was interesting for those reasons, though as a piece of the puzzle, the story interestingly relates to Cavendish's story via Somni seeing a film of his predicament, which takes us (mid-way through the interview and a sentence being formed!) to a land in the unfathomable future, where the world has descended into barbarism and primitivism: Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After.

This final story is the only one not to be broken mid-way through and focuses on a tribe of mountain-folk. The story is told in retrospect and is written in the dialect of the speaker both in his own reported speech and in the narrator's voice, occasionally broken when he asks for a drink of water etc., making everything seem so much more real. This is where the novel became somewhat tedious however, since the dialect of our narrator here speaks akin to Cletus from The Simpsons, his speech littered with apostrophes marking the purged letters and rendering this read a little difficult. However, I urge you to press on, because the story leads us through to Somni again, and through her, we arrive at Tim, carrying us back further to Luisa who throws us back even further until we wind up back at where the sentence was broken mid-way in the first story, that of Adam, who tells us of his final exploits and while at the end of each of our characters' lives, we come across death, humour and despair in equal measure, Cloud Atlas leaves us not with a burdened heart, or bored mind, but with hopeful eyes for the future. With Adam's final ponderings laid bare in his cataclysmic diary, contemplating the bright future that mankind might have, he sums up the great need for solidarity so that we learn to trust in our fellow companions through life, no matter what their denomination of us, making this time-spanning journey all the more beautiful; in all a brilliant read that contains something for everyone, and even more for those who can clearly see that the whole of this Atlas, is a book that is much greater than the mere sum of its pages. As the Times' review said, the book is a masterful feast, a banquet of literary cuisine and all I can say is that I'm sorry for arriving late.

Cloud Atlas (First Edition)

Carat Media Internship: Journal Entry #17

There's quite a lot to get through today so I'll just start right now. I attended an AMNET Team meeting where we discussed the benefits of using what is known as search retargeting, a kind of retargeting based upon the movements of individual consumers through their conversion path, the decisions made as they go remembered by cookies so that they can be segmented into possible consumer groups such as interest-specific, sub-culture-based etc. so that the end result delivers a personal creative in the ad space to hopefully drive them to clicking and -hopefully- converting as well. It was a very interesting meeting with a leaflet handed out to illustrate the benefits and in general was an inspiring event, that kick-started the day and injected life into me, which is why I think I got through so much.

 A New Strategy!

My main tasks for the day however were focused on more spendchecks and site transparency reports for our clients, filling in the previous days' spend and then using those to ascertain the main performing sites and then to specify the ones dragging the campaign performance down. Using these facts I was able to write up suggestions for the campaign in the future like I have done previously. There were actually some surprising results in the exchanges that weren't driving performance, and in certain -very popular sites- that, although drove very high levels of impressions (and therefore had low CPMs) they didn't drive any clicks or conversions which either lead to underspending or overspending on too few clicks or conversions e.g. some CPAs went over £100. In the end these were rooted out and so with a little luck and further trial and error, we'll ideally strike that golden balance we seek and find the sites that are best for us, combining them with exchanges that position them optimally.

This pretty much sums up the day, but it feels like I did more. I reality it was just the same few tasks completed for a few different clients, with some 4-5 site transparencies completed along with a couple of spend checks, which are becoming easier I am glad to say. The main benefit of these last two or three weeks however is not so much in the completion of reporting tasks but in interacting with our DSPs, with a colleague showing me how to plan strategy via the relevant tool, which was very enlightening in how we select groups of people from preset lists and place undesirable websites into either the basic exclusion list, that gets continually updated if particular URLs deliver poor results across multiple exchanges, and the blacklist, which stores bad sites such as the porn sites and -I imagine- sites associated with unsavoury political groups like terrorist organisations etc. All in all, I hope that you found this informative and I hope you'll come back next week.

Carat Media Internship: Journal Entry #16

* For this time last week.

Work was pretty varied this week. I completed some more PowerPoint work and also carried out some more spend checks and I am pleased to say that I think I am finally getting the hang of it (I even altered the budget in the DSP this time!)

But the first thing I did during the day -after struggling with connecting to Google and LinkedIn to complete some work- was to join in a meeting about display advertising -a basics session in which we examined the progress made by both AMNET (which stands for Aegis Media Network, I learned,) as well as the wider industry. There were people from external organisations present who wished to use our services, with the meeting geared to such an end. It was very interesting, learning about how display advertising has developed this year, especially when considering mobile devices (due to take over desktops later this year) and the growth of the platform relative to search. This was accompanied by a historical underpinning of online marketing and advertising agencies, beginning in the late 1990s with portals controlled by companies such as AOL and MSN to the mid-2000s with third-party ad agencies and the present-future position of integrated agencies that offer clients the breadth of services, refusing to distribute client information, offering greater transparency as a result. It was all very informative and whilst I am detailing such a subject, I should also point out a good piece of news this week: That Carat has successfully gained Mastercard's advertising contract, winning $200 Mn of business as a result, a very exciting development.

But moving on I returned to the office and began work on a PowerPoint, a "Ratecard" to be exact, which is basically a document -based on The Guardian's template- that details the types of targeting available on certain platforms, namely Facebook & Twitter seeing as LinkedIn was unavailable for some bizarre reason.

Twitter Targeting Matrix

So after completing the two slides I moved onto my old enemy -the spend check! The dreaded spreadsheet started at me with its large green segments like some kind of complicated tax form, I first thought. But it didn't take long for me to get my head around exactly what to do with it: Just look on the DSP, see what the figures say and transfer it to the appropriate column within the sheet. Even the large green areas aren't anything scary, just areas contrasting with the pre-arranged white areas containing formulae to calculate averages and totals seamlessly as you insert the data, it's ingenious! This enabled me to see how much we spent in conjunction with the averages and budget remaining and I discovered as a result, a complication with pacing, which allowed me to make a necessary change to the daily budget in order to allow for better pacing with trends within that particular campaign and strategy, a beautifully-organised and efficient way of conducting things. 

Not So Bad After All: A Typical Spend-Check

After completing a couple of spend checks I finished the day off with a return to some Facebook tasks associated with ascertaining whether or not a creative for a client had passed its expiry date by looking into the ad placements via FB's ad tool on multiple spreadsheets ad looking for patterns in revenue losses i.e. had it lost far too much business over the last four months or so. This was to try and prove to our client to update their creative strategy to hopefully make our own work easier, because after all, if the image lacks appeal in the first place, no amount of strategic placing will deliver the results desired. Sadly, my examination returned inconclusive analysis, the creative dipping only in December, largely -I imagine- to its lack of seasonal appeal or that of its products for that matter, which is of no relevance seeing as the ads have returned to normal spends now. But at least we're delivering usual results as we should be doing, which you can't argue with.

And that concludes this week's tasks, with a variety of work completed and a large amount of experience gained. Next week I should be completing similar tasks which I hope bestow equally-fruitful experiences and chances to shine. 

Thanks for reading. 

Carat Media Internship: Journal Entry #15

As I promised in the last post, I said that I'd reveal what work I've been carrying out at Carat this week, so here it is: I've been designing some more presentation slides, which was great fun and also completing a couple more spend checks, something that I have tried and failed in completing before. I think I am starting to get to grips with it and I did get to use our DSP in a little more depth, so there's experience mounting there.

Chronologically however, I started off in designing a presentation slide for a YouTube campaign, from which I worked out (both with a calculator and Excel) the various metrics pertaining to campaign success i.e. CPC, CTR, Conversions and Cost per View (CPV,) something with which I haven't worked before. Using this I made some pretty cool slides on how we performed and hopefully, these will aid the guys upstairs who deal with getting that type of info out to clients.

This was accompanied by a write-up on Word that detailed my opinions on campaign success, which was well-received I thought. In any case, this lead to my enlistment on another task involving PowerPoint, helping to design a presentation for the benefits to clients of using social media as a marketing tool. I did this through essentially copying boxes and images on other slides and adjusting them accordingly, both to save time as well as to ensure that the whole project ran uniformly throughout all of the slides, the consistency being a quality I was particularly pleased with in the end.

A Slide on LinkedIn Benefits

A Slide on FB Custom Audiences

After all of this I moved to completing a spend check for a couple of different clients, the spreadsheet requiring me to insert the data from our DSP into it to show correct CPC and other cost rates. Though I completed two different sheets, there were some campaigns for which I couldn't find the data and so could not complete the task in full as a result. I sent the sheets off at the end of the day and hopefully next week when I go through them I will show some progress and -hopefully again- what I have done will be correct when I receive feedback. If not then I will have to look into some kind of "baby-steps advice," though having searched Google for "spend checks," there doesn't seem to be much aid in the results, as if no-one's ever called them that before, which gives me reason to believe that elsewhere they're called something different, but I'll have to see. Hopefully I have overestimated my ineptitude and the checks completed last week will be fine. And so we shall see . . .  

Thanks for reading. 

February Update

Just a short post to provide an update on my writings, namely a novel that I began only 2-3 weeks ago. My last post on this stated that I was some 15,000 words into the first draft and that I had a 2000 word-a-day quota in order to get it finished. Well, it is currently some 30,500 words in length at present, which puts me at just over a third of the way through, nearing the halfway mark. It is in light of this that I have set myself -taking my daily quota into account- until February 28th to complete the work. I will update on this when that time arrives!

Can I do it?