Cool Marketing Thoughts

Today and yesterday, I was booked by an account for a really boring and time-consuming job. It’s totally useless in my eyes, work for nothing. I can’t even begin to tell you how much it feels like a waste of time. The problem is, it’s non-negotionable. But nevertheless, it still genuinely sucks. Aaargh!

I worked until 7 PM last night, and when I got home at 8 and had some dinner I continued working on it until somewhere around midnight. Today I arrived at work, and I’ve received the exact same briefing from that same account, only with a few changes concerning the product category. I knew it was coming, and I’m aware that this time, I can’t discuss the meaning.

Grrrrrrr. What a wasted time.

The worst part is, I miss out on a really cool thing which I wanted to participate in here at the agency, but because of this lame work I’m stuck with, I can’t join my colleagues with the cool assignment.

This is the last time I accept something from an account without thoroughly countering and questioning the goal of the discouraging activity. I’ll be posting again either tonight or tomorrow morning, cuz I have to go release some frustration in the fitness room. Now back to the boring assignment.

UPDATE: 13/09 10.00AM – Finally done with it. Man, it feels great. On to the next assignment, and this one is fun again :) Weeeh !

Howdy readers, I’m back from Djerba! It was a wonderful trip, and I can recommend it to everybody who needs a break. I’ve had a great time, saw some really nice things and relaxed a lot. Truly, I’m reborn… All set to throw myself right into online life and life at the agency with tons of new energy.

I’ve been uploading a lot of pics to Flickr, and finally decided to pay for a pro account, because apparently the basic (free) account only lets you edit and manage 200 pictures, and I already passed that amount, but never actually realized that some older pictures were out of range. At first I thought I lost all the older pics I uploaded, but as soon as I upgraded, they were all back in sight. Which is great.

So, here are a few nice pics from the trip, the rest can be seen in the set, should you care.

I’ll write something more about the hotel in a future post, but only for the google juice because nobody actually ever wrote anything about the hotel and the pictures ‘out there’ really are of a crappy quality. As for ‘ad blogging’, I’ll get to it starting tomorrow.

Thanks, Randy and Nathan, for moderating the comments and looking after the blog. I really appreciate it. I’ll start ‘answering’ comments tomorrow and I’ll start replying to the 400+ emails as well. It’s going to be quite a busy couple of days :)

As for the people who included me in their ‘Blogday 2006′ list on August 31st, thank you very much! I’ll do an ‘after Blogday’ post somewhere this week and list up some blogs of which I think they’re worth mentioning.

I’m surprized the DMCA takedown notice got so spread out, and I’ll also answer the emails I’ve received about that. I’m glad the ad-community cares about it enough to talk about this unfortunate fact. I’ll do a post about that later this week as well. Probably tomorrow.

Right now, I could use some extra sleep because I’m starting to work again in the morning. I-merge, here I come :) – it sounds silly, but I’m actually looking forward to working again. Can’t wait to see what the guys at the agency have been doing, which new pitches I can start to work on… I kind of missed ‘the rush’, a bit. Not too much… but certainly a bit. while I was floating in the pool or sipping from a cocktail, I often wondered what they were doing, for a few seconds. :)

Since I’m going to take the plane, this comic seemed kind of cute to post:

Source: BLaugh

Good morning readers! When you’re reading this, I’ll be on my way to the sunny isle of Djerba, situated in the south-east of Tunisia on the Gulf of Gabes. I’ll think of you guys, holding a cocktail in my hand, lying underneath a giant straw hat with my lovely gorgeous princess next to me. Yeah. It’s the time of the year to go at ease, chill out a bit and relax a lot. Just wanted to let you know.

We’ve booked a cozy hotel named ‘Les Dunes’ and it looks like this:

I’m off until September 4th, but I’ve scheduled about 25 posts for the next seven days, so normally your daily dose of ads should be covered. A lot of them are old ones from the offline archive, so it might very well be that you’ve seen some before. I’ve asked two nice guys to moderate the comments a bit, but you can expect a certain delay, and I don’t know if I have an internet connection at the hotel, so I’ll probably won’t answer to questions or reply to comments. Just so you know. Enjoy your days, I know I will.

Yesterday I threw a BBQ at my place for some friends. I had a great time and made lots of fun. I was nice to have those cool people together and I hope everybody enjoyed theirselves as well. There’s a few pictures online already on Flickr and I’ll send around a list with contact data so everybody has the chance to contact those they’ve met and had conversations with. Thanks, everyone who made it!

Here are some statistics for a bbq for 30 people, in case you’re throwing one in the near future for about the same amount of people:

Booze:

• Two crates of beer (48 x 25 cl)
• 6 bottles of cola (2 liters)
• 6 bottles of bubbly water (1 liter)
• 3 bottle of ice tea (1.5 liter)
• 6 bottles of white wine (1 liter)
• 6 bottles of red wine (1 liter)
• 1 bottle of red port (for cocktail sauce)
• 3 bottles orange juice (1 liter)

Appetizery Thingies:

• 1 kilo of salted peanuts
• 4 bags of potato chips (various tastes)
• Cheese cubes (3 boxes of 315 grams)
• Roll of salami to chop in cubes

Canned Stuff:

• Peaches (2 x 850 grams)
• Pineappel (2 x 850 grams)
• Corn (2 x 300 grams)

Veggies:

• 2 chunks of celery
• 2 cauliflowers
• 30 carrots
• 20 big tomatoes
• 4 big onions
• 4 crops of lettuce
• 3 cucumbers
• parsley
• about 50 radishes
• 15 potatoes

Fruit:

• 1 raceme of blue grapes
• 1 raceme of green grapes
• 1 little box of blackberries
• 1 little box of blueberries
• 1 little box of raspberries
• 1 little box of strawberries

General Stuff:

• 40 plastic cups
• 50 cardboard dinner plates
• 18 eggs
• 60 fish sticks (used only 29)
• garlic butter
• yoghurt (for dessert, with the berries)
• tomato ketchup (80 cl)
• salad dressing (2 liters)
• steak sauce
• Dijon mustard (for the cheese cubes)
• barbecue spices
• mixed pepper
• curry
• Provençal spices (500 grams)
• Pasta (1 kilo)
• 25 kilos of charcoal
• 1 jar of Applesauce

Total price tag is around 220 euros (280 dollars), but it’s worth every cent of it, if you get what I’ve gotten and have only 10% of the good time I had. Thanks for the Scotch, the gin and the Passoa and to all those who’ve brought extra wine: I’ll drink it all, promise :) … just not at once. And again, thank you all for coming. It means a lot to me.

This is pretty nifty. Calvin Klein Jeans (or the Chinese store of the CK brand) placed a two-ton heavy gigantic ball made of a bulk of jeans in an exhibition center in Xiamen, east China’s Fujian province on July 13th, 2006. The exhibition is themed ” Fashion Slave” and every visitor had the chance to win a 5,000 yuan ($625) cash reward if he or she worked out how many pairs of jeans it took to create the ball. Crazy. I wonder how long it took to create that piece of art.

Via AdArena

Damn. It was a long day today. Had lots of things to do, heavy projects to work on. Fixed the blog, but too tired to actually write something constructive. I think I’ll call it a day very early today and get a good night’s rest so I can be more productive tomorrow.

Stay tuned, but not today.

Cheers.

PS: Dear feed-readers: are you getting the images ok? If the ‘no hotlinking allowed’ image is showing, let me know, cuz that’s not supposed to be the case. Do I need to add more domains to the .htaccess? Drop a line in the comments, so I can update the file.