Procrastination

College is that magical time in your life when you get to attend less class than you ever have before in your life, spend more time researching randoms on Facebook than you do on your research paper, and live for four (or more) years in an unsupervised environment with 30,000 other kids your age funded by your parents.

And they say heaven doesn't exist.

But really, I would say the number one thing I've learned to do in college is procrastinate. Everyone knows the scenario:

3 Weeks before due date: Teacher hands out assignment. You shove it in your backpack and promptly forget it exists because you have "forever" to finish it.

2 weeks before due date: You find above assignment when conducting an impromptu cleaning of your backpack at 1 a.m. due to reaching your time limit on Megavideo. After identifying the meaning on the pile of papers, you throw it on your desk where you'll maybe see it tomorrow, but don't worry about it because there is "so much time" before it is due.

1 week before due date: While frantically studying for a midterm that starts in 2 hours, you find assignment. Disregard it because you have 3 midterms to study for between now and then.

1 day before due date: While talking to your friend in class, he questions about your progress on the assignment. You remember it exists and immediately enter "oh, s***" mode".

12 hours before due date: You ditch the rest of your classes for the day and head home, leaving yourself plenty of time to complete assignment. Spend the next 6 hours catching up on all the shows you meant to but never have time for.

6 hours before due date: Finally manage to close computer and start assignment. Realize you know absolutely nothing on the assignment, so decide to take brief power nap to rejuvenate.

3 hours before due date: Hm, power nap lasted longer than expected. Stare at assignment again. Nap did nothing to improve your knowledge of the assignment. Open laptop to look up how to do first question. But first, quickly check your Facebook.

2 hours before due date: Get off Facebook. You're hungry, so you decide to try out this new cheesecake recipe you've been meaning to make.

30 minutes before due date: Sit down and start assignment. Your stress is leveling out at approximately cruising altitude, so you start filling in random numbers with large graphs.

15 minutes before due date: You may be hallucinating. Graphs starting to make pretty shapes that look like laughing faces. You press on.

1 minute before due date: Log into Vista. "Error: Session Already Running". Try not to murder your computer. Refresh screen 15 times before Vista realizes that there is actually NO other screen open.

3 seconds before due date: Submit homework.

Don't insult the moon

I'm one of those people who loves print advertising. Like the kind of love where I'll buy magazines, look at the ads, and skip over the articles. As weird as that is, there's something fascinating about how a single page, consisting of a picture and words, can influence your purchasing behavior so much. In my opinion, the ads featuring the gorgeous models draping themselves over the surly but equally gorgeous men aren't the most effective form of advertising. Sure, they portray this enviable lifestyle of lust and longing (available to you to for the scant price of a $3000 handbag!), but advertisements that are more unique are much more effective at selling their desired product. If someone showed you a picture of a woman staring into the camera, you wouldn't be able to tell what makeup she is selling. However, if someone showed you the technicolor Ray-Ban "never hide" advertisements, the Ray-Ban product would instantly jump to your mind.

The Ray-Ban ads used to be my favorite print ads.

However, I recently discovered INQ's (who are, to the best of my knowledge, a European cell phone company) new advertisements, and they're giving Ray-Ban a run for their money. Check out my favorites:

A Typical Day At Wexley School For Girls

Ad agencies are, for most marketing students, this mysterious and powerful force, a workhouse full of eclectic creative geniuses who plot the next best way to draw in your attention, to manipulate you into buying something you previously never knew existed. Its a world popularized-and glamorized-by the award-winning TV show Mad Men. Of course, this situation seems to present a far from accurate view of the real world of ad agencies. So I set off on a brief mission to figure out what ad agencies today truly are.

My personal favorite?

Wexley School for Girls

"WTF" was basically my first thought in (trying) to nav

igate my way around their website. As words cannot pro

perly describe what I saw, check it out here. The few pictures I managed to find online... they seem to be fairly private about their actual office space

The handicapped parking spots in front of the building

The entrance to the building, designed to look like a Greek restaurant (the lobby has tables and booths)

Reception desk

Side view of the building

This is the only video I found that gives you a brief glimpse into the crazy minds behind Wexley School for girls... true randomness at its finest

Wexley School for Girls appears to be a straight up "screw you" to the posh ad world conveyed by Mad Men. And, to be honest, I would do ridiculous things to work there, even for a month.

Well, hello new life goal!

So I've always heard of people having these life epiphanies where they randomly decide to sign up for a class and voila! they love it and end up spending the next 10-50 years of their life (depending on how much they save for retirement and how much the economy managed to screw up during those years) working with, say, baby turtles in the Gulf of Mexico.

I've always been somewhat skeptical that something like this can actually happen. I always thought that this "epiphany" occurred conveniently at the end of second year when they were forced to choose their major. I'm sure many the "revelation" has been had in those final weeks of "what am I going to do with the rest of my life and why do I have to decide this at age twenty?"

Then it happened to me. But not in the way I was expecting. It was far from the moment I had envisioned: the heavens opening up, bright light shining down on me, and a deep voice saying "you have found your passion, now go, build plumbing in third world countries!"

It more just happened from me, for the first time in my life, trying to be a keener.

Side note: for my fellow Americans who have never heard the term keener (my new favorite Canadian word), Urban Dictionary defines it as follows: Individual eager to demonstrate knowledge or participate enthusiastically in school, church, seminars, etc. Like nerd,geek, brown-noser, smartypants, etc. but with more emphasis on willingness and enthusiasm, and less on social inadequacy, sycophancy, or natural ability.

Anyway, during my marketing class, my professor showed a slide with a picture of a book called Buyology. It really had nothing to do with whatever topic was on the slide at the time, but as a side note she mentioned that, if you had time, you should definitely pick up a copy of this book.

Lo and behold, the next week I found myself in front of Chapters with a crisp paycheck in my hand, so I decided to swing in and spend a good portion of my savings to buy this little, bright yellow paperback book. As I saw my bus pulling in across the street, I didn't even bother reading the back, just threw money at the cashier and did the common student mini-marathon across the street to leap on the bus. I then completely forgot about the book for the next few days.

Until, one day, I was on stumbleupon. com (for those of you who don't know, stumble upon is defined on Urban Dictionary as "The most addicting website ever." Pretty much all you need to know). I was on page 457, 394 of the day, and one of those "get the f*** off stumbleupon and read instead" pages came up. So, following this wise advice, I pulled out Buyology and cracked open the cover, not expecting to be entertained and guessing my return to stumbleupon was imminent.

Buyology is good.

Really, really good.

Basically epiphany-causing good.

For those of you who haven't heard of it, Martin Lindstrom, the author, embarks on this three-year long study investigating neuromarketing. Basically, his idea is that traditional marketing research, with the participants filling in surveys and answering interview questions about their reactions to certain products, are inaccurate. As humans, we have the total inability to interpret and successfully report our brain's true reactions to stimuli. Instead, we take the original thought and manipulate it to reflect what we think the audience and ourselves want to hear and report those findings, which are often inaccurate, albeit with a grain of truth. So Lindstrom decides to go right to the source and measure brain activity using mainly fMRIs to ssee how consumers truly react when they see a product. In these studies, he address the power of subliminal messaging (more powerful than we can ever imagine), sex in ads (less effective that its prevailence implies), product placement (often scarily effective if done right), the power of logos (so much less important than expected, and far from the end-all-be-all traditional marketing makes it out to be) and countless other advertising techniques. His results are nothing short of mindblowing.

And I found a new passion. I've known for a while that I want to study marketing with a minor in psychology because the two go hand-in-hand. But this idea of neuromarketing connects the two at such a deeper level. And the field is growing quickly. After Buyology made the New York Times Bestseller list, several huge companies, including Coke and Johnson and Johnson, started using neuromarketing to research the efficacy of their new campaigns.

As with every revolutionary new technique, it is not without controversy. Thousands of citizens complained that the new techniques are far too evasive to be considered moral, and many fear it could be used to manipulate consumers to make purchases that they never wanted to in the first place.

Not that I'm biased about this issue or anything, as hopefully it is going to be my future career, but isn't that the point of marketing in the first place?