Mad men on Sansome Street

I worked three days at an agency in SF this week.

Not much has changed in the advertising world in the last ten years.

The duct work is still exposed:

Caffeine still rules. (Sorry my photo of the pile of twelve packs of soda and cupboard of coffee --Peets, yay! -- in the kitchen didn't turn out.)


Half the employees are still hungover and reliving the experience with the other half. People start drinking at 3 on Friday. That's why I loved this business! Oh, and I sat by the water cooler and was amazed at the effort all the employees made to keep well hydrated until one told me it was because they were all hungover. Good times.

Bad times. There is still this lull in creating and producing. An agency sometimes feels like an office full of people justifying their existence and living in denial. It's too embarrassing to admit that we have spent days -- days!-- finding the right sentence or color to describe a restaurant. There's this joke in advertising -- "Relax, it's not brain surgery" -- and we repeat it but nobody really means it. We care and it's shameful, shameful that we're not in Afghanistan reconstructing bodies blown apart by suicide bombers or feeding the homeless.

I was writing copy to sell newly built Residences -- calling them condos is beneath them -- in L.A. My Creative Director had a really hard time approving copy and I couldn't decide if it was because that meant we'd have to commit to something and that our job would be done and we'd finally realize that we'd become dispensable or if my copy just sucked? So I wrote numerous versions to justify my existence.

It's a beautiful, weird business full of beautiful, weird geeks.