From Nuclear to Advertising Power

Yale-educated Wei-Tai Kwock surrendered his hard-won company and career to fight for our climate, working with Vice President Al Gore for the non-profit Climate Reality Project.  This wasn’t an obvious path. His grandfathers and father were into business and science. They had all fled China when the Communists took over in 1949, his parents coming to the U.S., his paternal grandparents going to the Philliipines . HIs grandparents never set foot in China again. (See Part 1 .)Wei-Tai's father did return, though, as soon as the country started ties with the U.S. (1979), and he took Wei-Tai with him. China was not as Wei-Tai's father remembered. Still, he was proud of the country's accomplishments, and eager to introduce other Americans to it. (See Part 2.) Wei-Tai also became enchanted with the idea of leading tour groups. (See Part 3.)Upon graduation, he decided to further his studies in China, attending Fudan University. He was one of many foreign students in what felt like a U.N. of sorts. After living and working in China for a bit, he got transferred to New York, and he quickly decided that city was not for him. He moved to California just in time for the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. ( See Part 4.)

 Despite the shaky start, Wei-Tai and Violet stayed in California, and he stayed for a year with the Nuclear-Energy consulting firm which was made up of three former GE nuclear engineers. As insiders, they believed nuclear wasn’t safe, left GE, became whistle blowers, andadvocated against industry growth.”It gave me great insight into the construction of nuclear plants, how difficult it is to regulate, and how expensive it is.  What the level of confidence needs to be in construction. “

One day, some friends of Wei-Tai asked if he had any interest to join a new Asian advertising agency they were starting—Dae Advertising.  “Absolutely not,” he said. “I had no interest in advertising.”

His friends convinced him to just come and sit in on a meeting. So he did. One thing led to another, and he soon found himself working there.

“When you watch KTSF—Channel 26—you’ll see Asian-language programming. And if you see Wells Fargo ads in Chinese, Lucky Store Ads, Southwest Airline ads, those were all produced by my ad agency, Dae Advertising.”

A Dae Advertising Campaign

There was a whole burst of multi-cultural advertising in Hispanic, African American and Asian markets throughout the 1990s, 2000s. In the mid 90s, when the world wide web came along, Dae Advertising branched out further, creating websites. They realized that Fortune 500 companies need multi-cultural websites, including Disney. They helped develop Disneyworld.com.  and Disneyland.com in Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, etc. Apple Computer asked Dae to build their first Chinese website featuring a product called the Chinese Dictation Kit, which allowed you to speak Chinese into the computer, and what you said appeared in Chinese characters on the screen.  “It worked pretty well, but it was a first-generation type of thing and so it was not perfect, as some of the voice recognition is now. But that was a complete break-through product developed mainly by Kai-Fu Lee. He ended up leaving Apple to run Google China and Microsoft China, and was the source of much litigation between those two companies fighting over him. And, now he’s a very famed venture capitalist in China.”

In 2006, Wei-Tai was happily involved in Dae Advertising, when his wife, Violet, suggested they go see a movie called An Inconvenient Truth. 
(To be continued. Next: Galvanized by a movie.)