shout, shout, young person!: the greatest team on earth (with pictures!)

YOU HEAR ME TALKIN'?

That's what's blasting out of my speakers right now. From Devo's Turn Around. The last stanza from that song I think describes our wonderful profession perfectly:

Take a step outside the planet
You and round
Now take a look at where you are
It's pretty scary

Today's one of those perfect days when inspiration flows freely throughout the agency. It started with a great night's sleep for me. I literally woke up at the crack of dawn with one single thought ringing like a bell in the pure serene of my mind. One of those magical moments when you literally feel the GE lightbulb above your head. I had found a great way to apply an insight from my wonderful boss Awrup. It's like how Terry Pratchett describes ideas that flow through space like particles and hit you out of nowhere.

So I sent a message to the whole team (all of whom were sleeping) and went back to sleep the sleep of an adman with an insight, which is 33% more restful than the sleep of the just. I was woken up by a wonderful friend who graduated today (much love to Anika and Fariha!) and the day was on. What a great time to be alive! (I am sounding syrupy in my happiness but I am explaining why.)

Sitting down in our lime-green conference room, the creative team was brainstorming one of our most emotionally important pitches of the year. My dawn epiphany was shot down in the first five minutes, because it was irrelevant. But someone else came up with something that was brilliant, elegant, absolutely beautiful, but incomplete--like half a butterfly wing. Someone else added a few changes to that idea and we were closer to a fully-formed concept. A seasoned art director, grizzled and bowed down by years of experience and a Master's degree, had a different way of seeing the climactic shot. A physics student fresh out of university added the tagline that wrapped everything up.

The realization hit me as it often does (and most often did in the two-year hiatus when I worked at other places): this is the best fucking creative team in the country. Which is easily said and said all the time I'm sure by every agency, but this is the most creative, wonderful group of people ever. And I'd go on being maudlin about shit but seriously, where else would you be able to work in the fields of music, literature and film all at once with some of the greatest pop artists of your generation?

Don't answer that. For the purposes of my argument, it's here. And this is what some of us look like. (Pictures taken in five minutes, post written in ten, lots of people aren't even in the office so bear with me here!)