Oh, What A Wonderful Week

Prior to SCA, a large chunk of my industry knowledge came via the Future of Advertising Podcast, so to kick off the week it was great to meet the man behind it, Dave Birss.

On Wednesday I attended my first advertising awards show, hopefully the first of many; the abundance of free wine, however, caught me slightly off guard and concluded in me throwing up at Waterloo station, before getting highly emotional about Kanye West’s recent breakdown… slow and steady wins the race people.

Also, quick life hack for y’all: if you put a shirt in the bottom of your bag and then expect an iron to magically appear from under a table at SCA, you’re going to an awards show with a creased shirt.

One big lesson I’ve learnt the latter side of our first term is that consistency is key, after a slow start to my SCA journey I’m finally starting to produce work I’m happy with brief after brief, and that has came through taking responsibility for every piece of work with my name on it – to have Sophie from the Metro tell me she looked forward to my ideas each week, was both a surprise and testament to that.

Quoting Dave Birss from earlier in the week “You’ve got to collect the dots before you connect the dots” so in the face of a raging hangover and looming deadlines, off we (Me, Sasha and our recently acquired daughter Beth) went to the Prince of Wales to see some live stand up.

Headlining the card was none other than Reginald D Hunter, who Pete assured me “has a habit of not showing up to gigs” – which as you can imagine boosted our excitement levels threefold. For the opening act, we got to witness a man’s life falling apart in front of our eyes, which thankfully was followed by the very talented Adam Hess, who was able to offer up some great insights regarding bowling.

Comedy shows = insights galore.

Working with Beth this week has been an absolute dream: headphones on with the heavy assistance of caffeine, watching her using illustrator isn’t too dissimilar to watching Neo enter the matrix – a mutually relaxed approach, a series of happy accidents and the expertise of Alex Taylor resulted in work we can both be proud of for PB1, and having our Kit Kat work passed on to Snapchat was just the cherry on top.

Things only got better on Saturday evening, Chelsea were back where they belong at the top of the league and Spurs were back to being Spurs. We hate Tottenham…

To cap it all off the New England Patriots came from behind and beat the New York Jets late Sunday night, which probably means zero to anybody reading this but it helps me sleep better at night so happy days!