Virtual aunthood!

It was like a family trip. A dysfunctional family trip with pouty teenagers who are constantly bored, don't want to try anything new, have little appreciation for anything you take them to experience, demand to be entertained, offer no suggestions as to what might make them happy and think it's always someone else's fault that they are having a miserable time.

Ice cream was the only definite winner. If you ever take your kids to Europe, plan some extra time in Florence, where the gelato may actually bring a smile to their frowny little faces. The Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, The Last Supper and the Duomo in Milan, the entire city of Florence and most of Rome were summarily dismissed. They said "eww" to anything other than pizza, McDonald's or ham and cheese sandwiches. They got bored of St Peter's Basilica at the Vatican after about 10 minutes and sat at the back waiting impatiently for us to finish looking at whatever we needed so much time to look at. They insisted we spend almost an entire day at Charles de Gaulle airport rather than leave our bags at the hotel and walk around the city. Bags are so important.

They pouted when we did what they wanted, pouted when they didn't know what they wanted, and sulked wholeheartedly if we ever did anything they didn't want to do. They missed the air conditioning in their house. They missed the corn on the cob from home. They even missed their jobs. They made us miss our flight to Milan and then said they would rather go home than pay for train tickets to make up for it because "it wasn't worth it."

But most of all they missed having the boyfriend - the old boyfriend - to themselves all the time. Because that's what they came for. They didn't want to see Europe, experience new things, get a new perspective on the world or open their minds, which he was so looking forward to helping them do. They didn't want to see the amazing works of art or architecture or history he was so excited to show them. Their greatest wish was to have him 100% of the time, with 100% of his attention, hanging out and talking about whatever they used to talk about just the way they used to do it.

So they just wanted old times, he just wanted them to appreciate new things and evolve a bit, and I just wanted to be accepted and maybe have some romantic moments with my loved one in such romantic cities. If you think about it, the extent to which these great wishes are at odds is almost poetic.

They were nice to me when they weren't sulking, but only from a distance. It was clear they would have preferred me not to be there, and while I would have been happy to get out of the way once in a while, the boyfriend wouldn't stand for it.

I gained some insight into how stepmothers must feel, which is funny since I have one that I don't like very much either. And by the end of the trip I had resigned myself to what I imagine is a stepmotherly hope, far downgraded from my original aspiration for this trip: maybe they'll grow to like me later, if and when they accept that he loves me and that things change sometimes and people move on and move around and do new things. Maybe we'll get along someday.

So anyway, here it is. The majority of what is outlined here is "literature review" - ie has already been covered in journals of marketing and advertising, and I'll just be recapping it to set myself up for my own piece of work. If anyone finds this at all interesting or wants to share any ideas or thoughts, please do bring 'em on!

For now, I am off on a little backpacks & hostels adventure around the continent. Au revoir, mes amis! Arrivaderci!

Background and literature review

1) General move toward social media and user generated content on the Internet. Blogs, Flickr, podcasts, Youtube, social networks. The Internet is evolving from a source of information to a source of entertainment.

2) YouTube has dramatically increased in popularity (and shareholder value, if its sale price to Google isn't completely insane). MySpace and other social networks have added video capabilities to user pages. Other video sharing sites such as Vimeo have cropped up, and players like Sony, AOL and Newscorp are investing heavily in online video, video-on-demand, etc. The number of online video spots being viewed by users is growing exponentially. (Supporting stats to be included.)

3) Advertisers agree they must find innovative ways of using emerging Internet platforms to reach consumers. Video is the big topic of the moment, with companies and agencies learning to create content for the web rather than simply using or editing existing TV spots. (Stats showing growth in online advertising trend, specifically video, to be included.)

The convergence of these trends has led to an increase in video campaigns and online video advertising with a participatory element. Marketers agree that they must learn how to get into this game, and find ways to engage with online video and video-sharing communities. The past few years have seen advertisements created by consumers (often in response to "create a commercial" contests), successful lo-fi video campaigns disguised as consumer-created content, genuine low-budget campaigns from small companies that garner significant audience participation, and some polished, high-budget successes.

There have also been many failed campaigns, and even passionate backlash against some companies entering online communities in ways perceived as unacceptable by community members. YouTube users, for example, clearly have very firm ideas about what is and is not acceptable use of their space. This was well evidenced by the vicious response to a Dove advertisement soliciting consumer-created commercials for one of its new products (although a Dove "Real Beauty" advertisement had been enthusiastically received mere months earlier). Similar backlashes occurred when marketers initially attempted to use blogs, making such faux pas as creating fictitious characters, pitching products overtly in blogs positioned as journals, and breaking other unwritten rules of the "blogosphere."

"YouTubers" and other video creators and social media users have their own unwritten code of conduct. They are not averse to advertising, but it is clear that they will not simply accept it on companies' own terms. There is general agreement in the literature that to be successful in online video advertising, companies will have to reach out to consumers and offer them compelling content.

Beyond the literature review

If this is the case, advertisers must learn to play by the rules of the online communities they wish to reach. The research will attempt to ascertain the "laws" companies must follow when approaching online video-sharing communities if they wish to have their brands and campaigns accepted. Why, for example, was the Dove "create a commercial" campaign derided while others, such as the "Tax Rap" campaign, have been enthusiastically embraced by the YouTube community? What makes BlendTec's "Will It Blend" campaign so much more popular than similar "shows" by Mountain Dew and other corporate brands? Possible key factors include user participation, size of the company advertising, style and budget of advertisement, and so forth.

The study will focus specifically on YouTube for two reasons: 1) YouTube is by far the most popular video-sharing site on the web, and has a dedicated and passionate core community of users, and 2) Staying within one video-sharing site will allow consistent comparison of user ratings (1 to 5 stars), video views and feedback (both in text comments and video replies).

Primary research will include evaluation and categorisation of videos, ratings, comments and responses, and may also include interviews with campaign creators and/or YouTube community members.

We did talk about it, awkward conversation though it was. He said maybe they were a bit different from other brothers and sisters because of their situation growing up. Their dad was never around and their mom was an alcoholic who used to leave them in the car when she went into the bar to drink, so they kind of fended for themselves and took care of each other. That's how it was from the time he was eight and she was five, he says, and you have a lot of physical contact with kids that age. It still seems like you'd outgrow that physical relationship, but I guess it's not my place to judge.

Never think you have already seen all of the general categories of relationship weirdness, because there are always more that you haven't thought of.

The two week family vacation was probably not the brightest idea. It was not particularly carefully considered, but there wasn't much to evaluate - they were only going to be here once, and we couldn't afford to take a separate trip by ourselves, so there you go. In or out.

Here's the worrying thing, besides the snuggly sibling component: the sister and brother in law are from a small town in the most sparsely populated state in the US. This is their first time out of the country. They seldom leave their own small town. They don't know why he left, and are probably not particularly happy that he felt he needed more than their part of the world had to offer. The three of them are close, but seem to stick with small talk, which is alien to me. "Simple stuff," the boyfriend replies when I ask him what he usually speaks with them about. "Is that because that's all they want to talk about, or because you've never tried to talk about anything else?" I ask him. He doesn't know but supposes he hasn't tried particularly hard. "They're kind of rednecks, honey," he reminds me, which seems rude, but hard to deny when they make comments about someone "Jewing" someone on a business deal, or talk about hanging out at strip clubs, which is apparently one of their main forms of entertainment. I sound like a city-girl snob, I guess. But you should hear the way the boyfriend talks, and he loves them.

The boyfriend says he feels between two worlds and is a bit self conscious about them seeing him as having changed. Yesterday this tension resulted in him being incredibly bad at acknowledging my existence at all. I have no idea how I'm going to fit in. And you know how it is meeting family. Even if you're an independent, standalone kind of girl, you don't want to feel like people would prefer that you weren't around.

I kind of suck at small talk. It feels false and starts to drive me crazy if it goes on for too long. And even some stuff that I would consider smalltalky can end up in awkwardness. For example, yesterday the brother in law noticed the Scottish flag and asked if there was another flag that looked like it. I said yes, I think the the Finnish flag has a blue cross instead of the blue "x," then wondered aloud if it was actually white on blue, not blue on white. The brother in law said he thought maybe it was white on blue, at which point the sister asked him pointedly, "When did you get so full of knowledge?" (His response: "Playing the in-flight trivia on the way over.")

The boyfriend, who actually left the small town six years ago to move to the closest significant-sized city one state over, talked a lot at the beginning of the year about how his background affected the way he approached people - namely that in a small town like his, it was not a good idea to act like you were smarter than anyone else. Or smart at all. My background is totally different. The people I grew up with, went to school with, and have surrounded myself with ever since, like to enjoy their brains, think, reflect. We like to talk about new things, learn stuff, speculate, look up words in the dictionary and look up flags on Google image search. We like to solve problems and riddles and figure stuff out. We correct each other when we get confused, because that is how we learn things, and no one takes it the wrong way if you say "My brother went to Spain and Barcelona," and you said "Oh, actually Barcelona is a city in Spain," because then they know, and it's nice to know things. With this group, someone says someone went to Spain and Barcelona and then there are a couple beats of uncomfortable silence before the conversation moves on. It's just weird to be in a social situation where your whole way of approaching discussion in general is... rude, I guess. Where showing that you know anything someone else doesn't know makes you a know-it-all.

Well, I guess "know-it-all" is relative. Maybe this will be a good opportunity to improve by diplomacy and learn to make small talk a bit better. It's sunny out today. My toes are a little cold, though. This Coca Cola Zero seems to taste the same as Diet Coke. Music is cool. I like things that are blue.

I guess that's all.

When I logged in to write this entry, I discovered that someone had called me whiny, self absorbed, vain and a slutty dirtbag on my "low key tribulations" entry. I find this pretty cool because a) It's the first time I've had a truly bitchy comment on any entry aside from the painted cats shenanigans! and b) I actually used to write far more "slutty dirtbag" type entries on here, but this time all I was mentioning was the recent drawn-out process of diagnosing an allergy to latex condoms, which I've been using with a grand total of one person for the last year. Sheesh, this Phobos character should have been around back in the drunken, just-broke-up-with-my-last-boyfriend days. It's a wonder no one called me a slutty dirtbag back then. And for the record, if I'm a slutbag, at least can point to a battery of tests certifying that I am a slutbag of the very cleanest variety.

So speaking of that latex allergy, I am the proud new owner of a matchstick-sized piece of plastic that lives in my cervix (aka the Mirena). A little piece of plastic with a tiny amount of hormone in it that will be released over the next five years, resulting in me not having to worry about birth control again for five! freaking! years?! Times like these you can't help but be overcome with the full wonder of living in modern times. This makes birth control pills look primitive, and those kicked off a whole sexual revolution in the 70s! It's exactly like getting laser eye surgery. A little bit of pain, a few days uncomfortable recovery, and then a burden (contact lenses / birth control) is lifted from your life forevermore and you quickly forget it ever existed. That said, it's a little weird to think that I have a piece of plastic inside of me. It's the first piece of plastic to make a home in my body, as far as I'm aware. I guess some people have pieces of plastic that make them more attractive, but I don't have any of those. I feel very high tech now.

Jobhunting is still hard, and making some of us over here a little bit depressed. No one expected it to be this difficult. It's never been this difficult for any of us before, and here we are feeling like total losers. I got a rejection letter the other day from one of my top-two-most-desired-over-the-last-few-months jobs and actually felt good just to have the closure. It has reached the point where rejection feels good merely because it supersedes the anticipation of rejection. The boyfriend and I have reached an informal deal where we take turns whining about our low self esteem. If you get a rejection letter, it is automatically your day. You get to feel sorry for yourself and the other person is obliged to humour and coddle you and tell you everything will be okay. It's a good system.

Sorry for spelling everything British. You get into the habit.

Here is a picture of a rather small castle from a distance. It's on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, a little bitty island off the Northeast coast of England that you can drive to only at certain parts of the day. The locals keep little "tide table" books so they'll know when they can get on and off the island. A taxi driver we met there said that every single week, some tourist tries to drive out at the wrong time, despite warnings, floods his or her car, and gets stranded in a very shallow sea. The rescue operations cost the locals hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.

All that having been said, I had a new experience this week: The Humiliating Job Interview. While the details are still vague to me, I believe this to be a category of interview wherein the interviewer has already decided you are not really up to the job. Perhaps he/she was simply looking to pad the shortlist with a couple more respondents, or - and this is my theory - perhaps his or her lackey did the shortlisting for him or her, resulting in you getting the interview simply because you're clever enough to mimic the vocabulary of the job description in your cover letter and CV, and said lackey held said JD and said CV side by side like those DNA data printouts you see on TV sometimes and said "looks like a relative." This is how you end up wasting an entire day commuting back and forth to a job interview for a position you know very little about, because who are you, really, to put further conditions on your time when you are, albeit still a student, unemployed?

Long story short, after a 4.5 hour train journey I found myself answering questions about deep career-related skills-based queries such as, "What made you decide to move to Prague?" I was asked very few questions about skills or experience that may relate to the job, for which I was apparently blindingly obviously unqualified, despite beginning to think during the interview that it actually sounded rather boring and unchallenging.

A friend commiserated with me at the pub upon my return from the-motion-sick-day-on-the-train-I-will-never-be-able-to-get-back
and recounted his tale of a recent lost cause interview along the same lines. "The guy chose to bust my balls about a job I had taken when I was twenty one, he said incredulously. 'Why did you decide to go into publishing? What was the logic behind that?' " Said friend is now 35 and has been in high tech for the last 11 years or so, having moved on from publishing at 24. To be fair, at least my ladies were kind enough to ask me chit chatty questions about a city I love... but if I wanted to talk about Prague, I'd rather just pop over to the coffee shop and show strangers pictures until one of them showed an interest. Dressing up in a suit and heels and dragging myself around the country is hardly necessary.

The saddest thing, however, is not the waste of time. The saddest thing is how demoralizing such an experience can be. The incredibly pathetic feeling of looking into the eyes of your interviewer and seeing some version of your mewling, silly, optimistic yet woefully unqualified self through their perception - this obvious mistake across the desk. Such a thing happened to the boyfriend recently. I was entirely convinced it was due to his appearance (he looks about 23), but then it happened to me. Not saying I look like an old hag or anything, but I don't look "Oh my god, this position is way too senior for you" either, I don't think.

Anyway, that sucked. And I arrived home to another rejection letter. Woe is me. It's so hard being a rich westerner about to finish her MBA.

In other news, for anyone who has read this far through my whining, which I now mercifully conclude, a public service announcement: it is possible to become allergic to latex. Let me tell you what it has taken me to figure this out: many many flucuonazole pills, a visit to the family planning clinic, a colorful visit to the "drop -n session" at the genito-urinary medicine clinic (filled with amusingly guilty faces and dodgy overheard conversations including such gems as "she looked safe!"), screenings for chlamydia, gonnhoreah, HIV, syphillus and a few other things I'd never heard of, months of nights filled with fever and pain, and finally... some latex free condoms that I had never bothered trying because it seemed all too bizarre that someone could just suddenly become allergic to latex. Well, ladies, gents, you can.

Caveat: if you are a teenager who has googled "latex allergy" because you have some kind of nasty symptom and landed at this page, please do not take this as evidence that you are just allergic to latex. You have to rule everything else out first. I'm just saying it's possible.

Next public service announcement: those polyurethane condoms are a lot more prone to slipping than the good old stretchy ones, hence you may increase your chances of having to dose up on half a month's worth of birth control pills, aka the morning-after pill, which as you can imagine is not the healthiest thing a woman can do to her body, and makes me, for one, more than a little bit testy. At which point you may throw in the towel and just opt to have a piece of hormone-releasing plastic stuck up into your you-know-what which, if successful, will mean you don't have to think about any more of these tribulations for at least five years. Maybe I'll let you guys know how that goes (I hear it hurts).

And that has been the career / vagina update for June. Thank you very much.

ps. I make these offerings of happiness:

 

Lately, sustainable business seems to be the buzz phrase in my world. I'm doing a project with a sustainability consulting firm that helps businesses become more sustainable and responsible, researching procurement in the public sector and what types of initiatives might help to push that forward. It's an unpaid project through the school, for a grade, but has been a stroke of luck - a wonderful learning experience.

The boyfriend's project focuses on importing an organic grain from a South American country. His partner has hijacked the operation and come up with ten thousand ridiculous ideas, the foremost being "pre-natal ceral" (yes, he said that, no, there was no logic to back it up - just the belief that people are stupid enough to buy anything if you market it properly). The aforementioned grain has become a hot topic of conversation, and we think about it constantly. What you could use it for, how you could market it, how you could return some of the profits to one of the most poverty-stricken countries in South America; it's exactly the type of business model I was trying to dream up before school started, and there may be an entrepreneurial opportunity there.

Finally, there's the kid with the crazy web 2.0 plan connecting graduates with socially responsible businesses, about which I cannot disclose any more detail at this point. Quite a firecracker, this boy, and he's asked me to join him in planning some of this business over the summer. You never know what could happen.

The point is, things come around. The things you really want will come within your reach if you hang in there. They always do. If you really mean it. Life is good to us that way.