My name is Eddie Choi. I do marketing for living. I have been working in marketing for over two decades mostly in Asia – Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, and recently Singapore. You can regard me as a digital marketer. My specialty is (was) search engine marketing and data analytics. My latest work in Singapore is design related. My passion is to integrate aesthetics with technology. I also co-founded probably the first Art Tech magazine in Hong Kong.
I am a tech enthusiast. Before I became a marketer, I was a programmer who started with COBOL and could code the entire POS solution using a PC database language called Clipper. I was paid to administer a HP3000 mini computer system which was the HP’s answer to the IBM legacy AS400 mini computer. I coded my first Javascript snippet for a web page in 1997. Knowing my history in computer programming, you know a geek is living inside my personality.
All of these are pretty much about what I am doing day to day. If you are interested about my professional background, my online bio is available at eddiechoi.me. You can connect me at my Linkedin too.
50% of marketing is a book title that I’ve been planning for long, really long, but it has never been a completed project. It is extremely difficult to write a book. Numerous excuses such as bad mood or laziness, schedule for work or travel, and then recently the pandemics has added into the procrastination list. I guess my reason is too many excuses with too little determination.
Speaking for writing this book, my goal is to put authenticity of marketing in the central theme. Why 50%? Because it is my experience in marketing. Not everything works and not every number is true as you’ve heard or read in the media for marketing. Seth Godin wrote a book in 2005 called “All Marketers are Liars” that probably seeded a thought for me. I didn’t read the entire book. But here is an excerpt that will give you some ideas of what’s Godin wrote about,
Before marketing, before shopping carts and long before infomercials, people started telling themselves stories. We noticed things. We noticed that the sun rose every morning and we invented a story about Helios and his chariot. People got sick and we made up stories about humors and bloodletting and we sent them to the barber to get well. Stories make it easier to understand the world. Stories are the only way we know to spread an idea. Marketers didn’t invent storytelling. They just perfected it.
How do you understand the concept of 50% in marketing? It could be a fact check for the other 50% untold truth or the behind-the-scene stories, or what is complementing the obvious 50% for the whole success? I am not interested in the investigative journalism which reveals how a brand works or why a brand fails? I want to start documenting my perspective for marketing, or the things that in my opinion are the marketing hype. I want to provide an answer of why a marketing success isn’t an easy outcome? I want to explain why people who have attended the digital marketing training but still feeling incapable of doing it correctly? There are so many questions of “why” in the marketing business which probably 50% of them are unanswered.
Before my dream-book come true, I’ve created this blog to enlighten you with my years of practice and experience in marketing. I hope you enjoy reading it.
