Eddie Choi
Tech and Art make me become me
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.
All Marketers are Liars – Seth Godin
Work
I co-founded Mills Creative in Singapore 2017. Mills is an independent creative agency passionate about aesthetics and design thinking. The clients of Mills include Google, Amazon, Meta, and Twitter. The agency won a couple of creative awards for the works delivered to the clients such as the Best Experiential Marketing Award for Google in 2020, the Best Virtual Event and the Best B2B Brand Experience for Amazon in 2021.
Winning awards is not my goal at work, but producing meaningful work is what I find joy in my professional life. I am a science believer. I’ve been doing digital marketing my whole life and I am a serial entrepreneur. I also co-founded probably the first Art Tech magazine in Hong Kong.
Life
I am a tech enthusiast. Before I became a marketer, I was a programmer who started with COBOL. I developed 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 there is a geek lives inside me.
Balance
I live in Hong Kong and Singapore. These two places each share 50% of my time. I start slowing my pace but I have no plan to retire myself. I like all kinds of music genres. I am an animal lover but I am not a vegetarian. I am an atheist but I believe our existence is beyond science. The world is imperfect but it also means there is always room to improve.
At the end, I believe when we get 50% of our life fulfilled, we let ourselves be motivated by pursuing the other 50% of the unfulfilled happiness.