ST Writes

Today most cars are purpose-built. They have doors that open wide, deep boots, small engines that save on petrol, and a slew of fancy gadgetry more sophisticated than the F-35 Fighter Jet. In their quest to win Car of the Year awards and sell hundreds of thousands worldwide, most cars end up losing passion. They are unbearable to drive and dreadful in corners. They will never set off your heart rate monitor warning, your palm will never sweat, and pupils never dilate. Enter the Nissan 350Z. In the century where Japanese cars are obsessed with bomb-proof Hiluxes, this is a refreshing reminisce of the more interesting days. To properly appreciate the 350Z, one has to reel back to its origin. In the 1960s, Nissan was a small automaker internationally and needed an iconic car to mark its place. It had to be a sports car that was fast, fun to drive, beautiful and most importantly more affordable than competitors. In 1969 the 240Z was born, marking the beginning of 6 ...

If you have been noticing that Facebook has been feeding you more of your friends’ content rather than that of Pages you follow, you are not losing your marbles. Facebook has been actively pushing the reach of Pages and brands lower down the priority list in exchange of your peers’. The initial reason for this was because the people at Menlo Park realised that user engagement with posts have been drastically dropping of late. So in the spirit of ‘bringing people closer together and building relationships’, Facebook made post from Pages disappear almost entirely from your Newsfeed. So here are some campaigns you can adopt for your Page to adapt to the new Facebook Order. Increase Ads Budget Let’s get the most crucial matter out of the bag: in order to regain your Page’s reach, you will be required to ramp up your ad Ringgit. Facebook is playing simple Supply and Demand with their limited placement slots here. When the new algorithm dramatically reduced reach of posts by Pages, it na...

On the 20th of June 2018, Instagram launched a new and ambitious move to rival video streaming giant YouTube, but with a twist. Instagram was going to start a new wave of long-form vertical video format, which at first glance appeared to be a sensible evolution seeing most content are already consumed in mobile devices being held vertically. The name of this new platform was IGTV, short for Instagram Television. IGTV was already the most celebrated kid on the tech block on the very first week of launch. It received a red carpet premiere, something Instagram has not done since 2013. Their launch efforts also included having influencers and celebrities create and share their own videos. But all the glitz and glamor of this new much talked-about “YouTube Killer” was short-lived. Just few weeks after IGTV’s over-the-top launched, number of downloads halved every subsequent week and active users also saw massive drops. While CEO Kevin Systrom is still hopeful that IGTV’s new platform just...

With the peak of technology and high speed Internet, work teams no longer need to be physically rooted in the same location in order to work. In fact, there is a growing trend of organisations all around the world collaborating successfully without needing to be in the same physical location. As of 2016, Forbes listed 125 companies that managed to successfully adopt the culture of telecommuting. Another article from Forbes also listed the benefits of telecommuting employees include improving productivity, reducing pollution caused by commutes, and decreasing organisation overheads, among others. The secret to starting a culture of remote working with your team depends mostly on creating and maintaining a set of operational systems. If you are considering setting up a team that can work remotely, here are the top 5 collaboration tools that can get you started. Slack At the very core of a successful remote team is communication, because lacking this element all teams will falter. Sla...

These days online content has very short shelf life and life span, which is why the urgency get them published is critical. While it is important to apply some additional touch to pictures and videos, constantly moving content between laptops to be edited and back to mobile devices to be uploaded is extremely annoying. Since the mobile powerhouses we have in our pockets are already more advanced than the computers used to launch mankind to the moon, surely we can do better at something as simple as edit photos and videos. Thankfully, we are starting to see a maturity in both mobile devices operating systems and applications converging to allow for some solid content creation. Images and videos to be posted on social media just require simple touch ups and tweaks before they are ‘Insta-worthy’, so GPU-demanding editing software need not apply. Here are the top 5 mobile apps you can have in your devices to add some spark to your content. VSCO VSCO is a classic and all-time...

Facebook Ads is quite possibly the most powerful advertising platform in the world today. It supports all advertisements that run in the 1st and 3rd largest social media platforms - Facebook and Instagram - and the largest messaging platform in the world - Facebook Messenger. That comes up to around 4.347 billion active monthly users as of the year 2018, according to Statista, which is around 56% of the world’s population. But what sets advertising on Facebook apart from other platforms is in its in-depth Artificial Intelligence and a large pool of user information gathered over the years, which keeps getting better and better. While this level of data accumulation may freak regular users a little, Facebook’s ability to narrow down to users’ consumption behavior is the best news for marketers yet. Never in the history of all civilization have we been able to direct advertisements toward people based on their hobbies, interests, age group, and where they work or live. And ...