Fast Forward 2 months later... We're in HK!

This will hopefully be the beginning of my Hong Kong adventure blogs. Ben and I have safely gotten to HK and settled into our first week here. Here's a short synopsis so far...

Dec 19 - Landed in HK after 22 hours of transit, paying $175 in excess luggage and overweight fees, and an unexpected stop in Taipei for refueling. We had way too much stuff with us! Luckily, picking up the boys at cargo was relatively trouble free. We lugged our 6 luggages and the 2 kittie carriers and hopped on 2 cabs to get to our temporary serviced apartment in Soho.

Dec 20 - With the day and nights still jumbled in our heads, we ended up with 6 hour naps in the afternoon into the day and catching really late dinners for the last two days. We did manage to check out some apartments and have found one we liked a lot. Luckily for us, rent prices have come down a lot so we are hoping to find a pretty nice place :-). We've been alternating between nicer restaurants in Soho and holes in the wall noodle places. We finally made it to Lan Kwai Fong (LKF) for a dinner but not ready for drinks yet. Luckily we bumped into a giant dreidel who told us about the Chanukah festivities the following day. It'll be nice to have Ben join in a Jewish festivity here in HK!

This is the giant dreidel and Ben

This is a pic of LKF - expat party central

Dec 21 - We decided to trek to Wanchai and get some much needed outlet converters since none of our appliances would plug in. We got converters and a small transformer for some electronics - laptop, electric toothbrush, camera charger, phone charger, etc. (you get the drift... ^_^). And then we joined my boss and what seemed like all the Jews in HK for the candle lighting ceremony right outside the Bank of China building. Quite an amazing and contrasting sight!

Pic of our bed that comes off of the ceiling ^_^ right on top of our dining table.

Dec 22 - Dec 24 - My first three days of work. I am getting used to my commute to work which is composed of several escalator rides down to the IFC building then a brisk walk down to the ferry pier and a 12 minute ferry ride to the mainland side. I'm loving the ferry ride! I get to have my morning breakfast and read the paper. Star TV is then less than 5 minutes walk from the pier. On my rides back,I get to enjoy the beautiful evening skyline of Hong Kong which are extra adorned for Christmas and New Year. Ben continued to apartment hunt and has found a couple of others that sound great so I got to take a look at them after work on my slightly shorter day on Christmas Eve.

Dec 25 - It's been weird spending Christmas outside of the U.S. I think today more than any other day so far I've missed not being in the U.S. and being close to family and friends. We enjoyed a nice American dinner at the Flying Pan and caught a "Tale of Despereaux" at the Pacific Place - this extremely ex-pat and high end mall, and then wrapped up the day with some Rioja wine from Spain and cheese. Merry Christmas Everyone!!! Really miss everyone!!!

	View of Kowloon from the ferry on my way to work
	View of Kowloon from the ferry on my way home from work

I feel much better about relocating the cats now...

I had gotten quotes from $3000 to $4000 to relocate my cats. Gee!

Like all owners, I would hate it if my kitties had to spend any time in quarantine but spending $3k to $4k can't be the solution... So I started looking into everything that needed to be done.

1. Microchipped
2. Vaccinated
3. Import Permit from HK
4. Health Certificate and 2 other certificates
5. Booking them on air cargo

It all seemed do-able by me. So I compiled all the paperwork I needed and drew up the process and added it all to my MS Project Ghantt chart.

It came down to these tasks which seemed all too doable...


Pet Tasks

File HK Permit forms (DONE)

Buy IATA compliant Pet Carriers (In process)

Buy other travel needed items

Get cats vaccinated & microchipped (DONE)

Get health certification

Get Health Certification USDA certified

Make copies (3) of Health Certification

Book cargo flight as Manifest Cargo and show them all paperwork

Get Air Waybill number

Use Prior Document Checking Service to make sure all paperwork is okay - via email

Notify HK of the arrival of the pets 2 days prior

We'll see how well I do...

Moving to Hong Kong - Starting the Planning

We finally made the committment to move to Hong Kong (yes... at least for the next year or two). Let all the planning begin!

I started drafting everything that needed to be done in MS Project yesterday and there are already nearly 60 line items on there. Includes every detail from getting my two cats health certificates to holding a garage sale for all our stuff. It's daunting! But we've got to start somewhere.

Online Advertising 101

I work with some extremely smart people. This enables me to learn new things every day whether that's in technology or in business. So this first lesson is on the business side and our business is online advertising.

The VP of Product Management provided a great intro into our business to the Data Warehouse team yesterday and I wanted to share what I can here. The specific statistics/data links were something I went digging around to provide concrete information.

• First, what does the advertising market look like?

Here is a pretty good picture from Advertising Age:
http://adage.com/images/random/datacenter/2008/spendtrends08.pdf

Total Ad spend in 2007 is around $149Billion. With 49.22% ($64.43B) on TV in its various forms, 39.3% ($58.55B) on print (newspaper and magazines), 7.6% ($11.3B) on internet, 7.2% ($10.69B) on Radio, and the rest 2.7% ($4.02B) on Outdoors (which is dominated by ClearChannel).

Most of the online advertising dollars are spent on paid search (where Google dominates and we even use them ) and the rest on display ads. What I'll focus here on is display advertising since that's our business.

• So, what are all the different types of ads?

We deal with banner ads so different types of ads are defined by their sizes. These are the most common ones that we deal with:

1. Leaderboard (728 x 90) - you'll see these at the top of the pages


2. Medium Rectangle - "Med Rec" (300 x 250)


3. Skyscraper (160 x 600 and 120 x 600) - you'll see these on the sizes of the pages


4. Half Page (434 x 600)

You can read more about ad types here: http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/banner-advertising-different-type-of-banners-374815.html

• Next, what are buyers and sellers looking for?

Buyers are looking for ROI (return on investment) and that can be in the forms of increasing brand recognition, getting new leads and sales, and increasing influence.

Sellers in return are looking to continue to provide good user experience while also maximizing revenue. They additionally also want to increase their market share, show/prove to buyers their value and educate buyers, and protect their brand.

• So what happens after sellers and buyers come together

They start working on contract terms while buyers and sellers are both looking for best deals possible. They'll need to define the ad types, the volume, the budget, the pricing model, and the target audience. Pricing models include:

1. Fixed price


2. CPC - per click


3. CPM - per 1000 impressions


4. CPA - per action

Sellers need to come in knowing where they want the pricing to be at based on historical performance, ROI, and supply / volume. All of this is more of an art than science.

In terms of defining the target audience, there are different ways that buyers can define this. They can specify which site or channels they want. These are considered 'endemic content'. Other targets they can specify are: demographic (age, gender), geography (city/dma/state/zip code), interests (sports, travel, etc). One challenge for social network sites is that unlike traditional content sites, they don't have much content that's considered 'endemic content' so they can only leverage demographic and geographic data. They'll then also need to take the extra step of understanding the interests of their users.

• And finally, once it's all said and done, how does the sale get fulfilled?

Account execs, account managers and sales planners work with buyers/advertisers to get the sale defined and get the details on the creative assets. Once they get the creative assents then the campaign get created by campaign managers and added to the ad serving system. The ads then get served.

• What next?

Once campaings are served, it's then all about performance metrics: did the actual meet the advertiser asks, how many people viewed it, how many people clicked on it, what was the conversion rate, what kind of audience did it reach, etc?

Providing all this information back to the buyers gives them the knowledge to figure out their ROI and by providing more in depth knowledge about their audience, we add to their ROI. This in turn would drive them to come back and buy more ads.

Hope this helps answer some questions for those interested to jump in to this exciting business.