Semcon 2008, sorry.

Friends, I have a confession to make: There is a huge disparity between the life I chronicle in this great blog and the real life I live. You see, in this blog, you read about an overweight 26-year-old man who has a menagerie of mental and emotional dysfunctions that range from anxiety to borderline psychosis–conditions which, in effect, causes me to sometimes break down, cry and masturbate with a vigor that, aptly enough, is akin to that of mental patient for no particular reason.

What I don’t tell you enough is that I am a pretty successful mid-level executive for an US-based Internet 500 top retailer. Here’s the short version of how that happened: Because of my charm, my ambition and my intelligence, I was able to rise above considerable poverty to attend a private grade school school where I got the distinction of getting the highest National Elementary Aptitude Test score in my district.

After high school, because of my shrewd, devious influence, I was able to get into the medical program of one of the better medical universities in the country where, after two years, because of the unhealthy obsession I had for video games, I dropped out and easily got a Marketing degree from a not-so-prestigious business school.

Finally, because of sheer luck, a kind job market and alcohol-induced casual calmness which employers mistook for confidence I was able to land key positions and jobs that got me where I am today.

In the jobs I had, I learned a great deal about Customer Relations Management, Account Management, Internet Advertising and Internet Marketing. So yeah, I guess what I’m saying is that I’m pretty competent at what I do but, I am, in no means, a guru. I mean, if I were to summarize my entire academic and professional life with just several words, the words I’d use would probably be “Winging”, “bluffing” and “bullshit” also “not”, “having”, “consensual” and “sex”

So, you could only imagine my surprise when I was given a speaking gig over at the 2008 Search Engine Marketing Conference. I cannot stress enough the monumental lapse in judgment the person who decided to include me in the list of the “brightest stars of the local marketing scene” they have as speakers. I actually imagine the planning meeting the organizers of this event had to have gone something like this:

Organizer 1: “So I managed to get a senior management guy from Yahoo! Southeast Asia to present for us. How about you guys?

Organizer 2: “Well, I got a prominent managing director from a Thailand-based Interactive marketing firm to confirm. Anyone else?”

Organizer 3: “Well I managed to get this local internet celebrity who does marketing work for a US-based internet retailer. I heard he does nothing at work but make personal phone calls and running a small sports betting operation from his cubicle. But he’s REALLY funny and people get a kick out of seeing him fail so I think it’s a good idea.”

Organizer 1: “I like it! You know what else we can do? Maybe we can put him on a panel with SEO experts so people could be entertained watching him make a complete tool out of himself!”

[Organizer 1 and Organizer 2 exchange high fives]

Organizer 3: “So are we done here? You guys want to snort some lines and get fucked up somewhere?”

Organizer 1 and 2: “k!”

Fast forward to Tuesday, with my armpits assured of dryness thanks to the sheets of newspaper I crammed in them and with 2 tablets of xanax in one hand and my crotch in the other, I went up to the podium confident that my talk would go hitch-free. After all, I’ve talked about my topic dozens of times before.

My talk was pretty uneventful a couple of slides into it, I started off with one of my killer jokes I’m notorioulsy known for and several more jokes later, I was literally bringing the house down. Everything was going fine until somewhere in my tenth slide when I realized that the images in my presentation were NOT displaying. AT ALL.

Now, I have a dilemma in my hands. I was talking about CPM and creating the perfect banner ad and people, naturally, were expecting to see examples.

I was in full panic mode at that point. I saw two possible routes I could take at that point: one, I could start apologizing profusely and maybe promise all the people in the room a 500 peso refund off the 9,500 pesos they paid for admission or two, I could pull off a Michael Jordan Flu game push through with my presentation and drop 38 points on the audience’s collective asses. I took the second route.

So, I digged through my arsenal of sure-fire jokes and charmed my way through the entire thing–something which apparently worked really well.

So yeah, to all of you who attended SEMCON 2008 and had the misfortune of witnessing my talk, I apologize profusely to you. In my defense, it wasn’t entirely my fault. It was Microsoft Powerpoint’s fault that it couldn’t render something I made out of Apple iWork’s Keynote application properly. Also, partly, it was NingNing, our maid’s fault because she couldn’t follow simple instructions. (The night before my talk, a couple of friends invited me for a few drinks and I asked NingNing to embed the images I am going to use on my presentation on keynote. I told her explicitly to use the Insert > Images > From file menu but I guess she thinks she knows better and drag and dropped the things into the slides. I guess we all know why she’s a fucking maid and why I’m a Senior Marketing Manager. Fucking idiot I swear.)

Anyway, I leave you all with a video of the epic failure that was my SEMCON 2008 talk:

SEMCON 2008 Excerpt - Beyond CPM from Mike Villar on Vimeo.

Tags: event, failure, funny, internet, Marketing, search engine, semcon, speech, talk