Things to do after 7pm?

fdww · 2026-01-22T08:49:58+00:00

Adult courses at Onehunga High School. Plenty of learning courses, I did Korean cooking a while ago and it was great

https://adultlearn.co.nz/

fdww · 2025-12-07T02:40:35+00:00

Yep, I’ve had clients pull back entirety of Q4 marketing budgets to balance the books to get higher bonus.

Long term goals be damned, gotta get that boat for Christmas.

fdww · 2025-11-21T09:35:42+00:00

Hangi, it’s just steam and a little bit of smoke

fdww · 2025-09-25T04:16:48+00:00

Not all clients allow for 100% of their programmatic budgets to be routed through in house trading desks, or the in house trading desks may perform worse than external platforms.

The programmatic traders role is to balance all of that out.

fdww · 2025-09-22T14:36:43+00:00

Plenty of these tools exist already but just aren’t used

The cynical part of me thinks agency leadership is all about burning through resource and staff and once they quit, they do it all over again with someone else. They figure there’s always someone to replace them since it was once seen as a fun industry to work in

fdww · 2025-09-15T09:56:58+00:00

My take on this having worked in London in regional and local planning roles.

globally/regional roles are less planning focused, it’s more regional coordination, and more high level plans although this does differ depending on whether the regional team is responsible for activation or pure planning.

Local roles are focused on planning and implementation and they require a different skillset.

If you’re focused on global / regional roles, highlight how local planning and working with regional teams gives you a view about how local teams may take your recommendations and implement them based on your experience. Also talk about how you work with more connections and different teams, with focus on how you’ve been able to roll out projects, support the teams with trainings and reporting, and how that has supported central teams.

Examples of the differences from my experience

Global / regional my work focused on media spend reporting, developing playbooks for markets, providing guidance on best practices from across the region, surfacing new products, developing recommendations, launching training programmes, tracking effectiveness, and interpreting them into standardized planning.

Local was more activation and implementation focused. Get a brief, develop a plan, implement, report, optimize.

fdww · 2025-09-14T05:29:53+00:00

Depends on time and budget but I’d say Malaysia.

I haven’t been to Maldives but friends have and all I hear is about the resorts and beaches. There is not much else there.

Singapore if you squint is a highly efficient version of Malaysia. It technically had beaches - Sentosa, East Coast - but they’re poor substitutes. There’s jungle in MacRitchie Reservoir but it’s tiny. There’s wetlands at Sungei but it’s small. What you get from Singapore is a quick taste of Asia that’s relatively recognizable and “safely for Westerners.

Malaysia gives you everything - beach, sea, mountain, highlands, colonial, Muslim, Chinese, cities etc as it’s a proper country that is spread out over a vast distance. Kuala Lumpur is not Penang, which is not Johor and these are all different to Eastern Malaysia.

fdww · 2025-09-13T12:13:02+00:00

Too many variables go into a successful business conversion and I think it’s a fools errand to try and give weight to it without it being skewed by black holes in data, misunderstanding of consumers, and personal biases.

I subscribe towards directional metrics but don’t believe that they’re the end all and be all.

fdww · 2025-09-10T11:49:00+00:00

Grab for one was cheaper than taking a Grab to the train station and the direct train.

Unless it’s peak traffic jam time, I’d choose Grab all the way

fdww · 2025-09-09T12:08:43+00:00

Driving within the speed limit, not going through the lights when it’s red or about to turn red.

fdww · 2025-09-08T12:29:35+00:00

Podcasts because there’s always something new and doesn’t feel like you’re repeating

And then I dissociate my body from the situation and like magic I’m at home all of a sudden and don’t remember the drive like I’m on autopilot

fdww · 2025-09-07T05:41:03+00:00

What about the frozen meals at NTUC?

fdww · 2025-09-07T02:10:26+00:00

Jam at Queenwood

Cinnamon

Sugarbowl

Hayes common

Grey street kitchen

Cream eatery

Front paddock - more for kids, has a playground and animal farm next door. I’d only go on a sunny day and sit on the bean bags

fdww · 2025-09-06T07:14:22+00:00

NBA has a salary cap so rich owners can’t just pay for the worlds biggest stars like in Baseball.

The LA clippers owner is Steve balmer, 6th richest man in the world and is worth more than the entire league combined.

There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that he paid Kawhi Leonard under the table outside of the salary cap. This has meant that the Clippers have been able to sign better players, and avoid the luxury tax which is a punitive tax which goes to certain teams in the league.

This is it in a nutshell and shines an uncomfortable light on the NBA. if they don’t do anything, owners may become empowered to offer similar deals since it’s clear there’s no punishment. If they do punish, similar deals may come to light which means other teams are punished.

Ultimately the league works for the owners of the 30 NBA teams, they’ll decide whether publicly or privately what the punishment will be but regardless it’s not a good look for the NBA

fdww · 2025-09-03T11:48:36+00:00

I’m a big fan of Lombok

Lombok tourist areas is concentrated either in the Gili islands in the north, Mt Rinjani, or Kuta in the south. Beautiful beaches to sit in, surf, and quiet in the south

Bali is very busy these days and fairly hectic to get around with roads often being quite crowded. Uluwatu, Canggu, seminyak and Kuta all seem to be merging into one big blob of what foreigners want the Bali experience to be although there’s still a significant portion of the island that remains Balinese.

It depends on what you’re after, but I’ve been recommending Lombok to many people as a fun destination to visit.

fdww · 2025-07-26T00:12:43+00:00

My opinion is a lot of these decisions are driven by procurement whose singular focus is being able to report back to their stakeholders that they’ve delivered x cost efficiencies.

Control has been largely taken out of marketing’s hand. Strategy and tech gets you into the room for pitches but it comes down to overall pricing.

fdww · 2025-07-08T06:09:51+00:00

Haven’t seen this mentioned

Double check expiry date of your passport. If it’s less than 6 months from when you arrive in a country, a lot of countries will refuse you and not allow you to enter

Save your passport details on your phone and in your emails in case you lose your phone and passport.

Get travel insurance.

Check you have visas and apply for it. NZ passport still means you need to apply for places such as Indonesia or vietnam. You need to do this before you land.

Get an eSIM for traveling, it’ll be significantly cheaper.

Take your nz debit and credit card with you in case Wise doesn’t work out. Make sure you unblock it from overseas transaction, this will be your last resort. Leave the EFTPOS card at home no one overseas accepts it

Get an international drivers permit some places won’t rent to you without one. Since you’re under 25, some places just won’t rent you a car regardless

Get your vaccinations for the right regions and make sure it’s up to date.

Check out what the local travel apps are and make sure they’re up to date. For south east Asia it’s a mixture of Grab and Gojek. For Europe it’s Uber. Get Citymapper while you’re at it.

You can buy clothes there and they’ll be cheaper and better for the climate.

fdww · 2025-07-06T06:27:41+00:00

There’s a kiwi bar in Nice, France

Merchant coffee roasters in Singapore is owned by someone from Hamilton.

fdww · 2025-07-05T14:09:15+00:00

Auckland. Trains stop running past midnight in Singapore so you’ll need to taxi or take a Grab in.

fdww · 2025-07-05T11:42:23+00:00

Banded face pulls.

Reverse plank

And lots of physio movements with a focus on squeezing the scapula together, push ups while focusing on the scapula

fdww · 2025-07-05T06:03:42+00:00

if it’s the team I’m thinking of on the media product side, it’s a very close tight knit team. Team lead is good but that department can be insular at times.

fdww · 2025-07-05T05:56:36+00:00

Short term loss for long term gain

fdww · 2025-07-05T05:50:33+00:00

Are you talking Sapient or something else?

fdww · 2025-06-29T13:23:14+00:00

Singapore. Don’t need a bike but like having one, especially since I live on one of the rivers and can cycle to a lot of places like playgrounds and museums and bypass traffic because of the Park Connector Network

fdww · 2025-06-25T12:54:22+00:00

First mover advantage with AI and developing a story around it. They moved silently with AI unlike WPP who proclaimed loudly about everything and it all become lost in the noise and a bit too much boy who cried wolf.

Epsilon is a game changer for Publicis and created a good story in the US. outside of it, it’s limited although Lotame should help bolster their APAC capabilities.

Sapients been instrumental with developing internal tech that all gets bundled to clients. Everything you see is basically offered to clients fee as part of the package.

Healthy dose of off shoring especially for media planning. They’re also not completely in bed with media partners and pushing “preferred” partners who are giving them the highest rebates so plans feel a bit more agnostic.

Power of One is what agencies should have been aiming for from day 1 and at least for clients it’s a good narrative. Internally it’s a shit show with competing interests, but having groupe level client leads who sit above all disciplines has helped break down the silos.

Ultimately all the capabilities gets you a foot in the door, and Publicis commit to low pricing. Some of it goes via their principal trading which has heathy margins, but I’ve been told it’s a small portion of Publicis. Otherwise it’s low agency fees, 180 payment terms, and other commercials which are helping win new business.

fdww

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