My monthly flow

There's an inevitable ebb and flow of intensity with a job in advertising. It seems to be lately that it's been primarily a flow for us.

After our presentation to Starbucks on Thursday, Karen and I had a relatively light Friday. Great, we thought. Perhaps we'll actually have a weekend! (It'd be the first.)

Such thoughts were brought to a halt with a call around 9:00 that night. (For some reason all calls from Wieden seem to happen at 9:00. I've just realized that. That's the third time it's happened, and all for very different purposes.) Long story short, we were called in for the weekend to work on some alternative ideas and TV for different project other than the one we've been working on. It was sort of nice to step into someone else's campaign that was at least partially realized and try to figure how to enhance it.

Even more, it was another learning experience. As the campaigns weren't ours, it was interesting to watch from somewhat of an outsiders perspective and see how the main team worked through the problem and how our CD worked the idea.

The thing I'm truly stupified by is Joe's inhuman talent to generate ideas on command. Watching him work is like watching a mathematician at a chalkboard. You can see him going over it all in his head, and then suddenly he spits out a computation. Except the computation is a wonderful string of words rather than a string of numbers. He writes lines and TV spots in seconds.

That's another thing that we're trying to grow accustomed to, the sheer speed. Everything seems to happen very last minute. Or rather, the ideas and strategies are working, and the actual execution and refinement is an enormous group effort that spans creatives, CDs, account and studio all running like mad to pull it off. Then it goes through more rounds—the ECDs, the big guy—and more corrections. But it all happens in rapid succession.

This is surely nothing new to any vets, but as a green it's still very much a whirlwind of activity, decisions, deadlines and close calls. And it makes it all the more impressive to watch a brilliant creative spin some magic in an atmosphere like that.

So, bottom line: It's crazy fast, but it's crazy awesome.

And I'm not sure it's going to really ebb any time soon.