This week began with six new people joining our team, all in one day. This brings the total number of recently added team members up to eight. The office feels very different, bursting with new energy.

The new creative members managed to crack a strong insight for the positioning of a new brand we are currently working on. This made the rest of us very happy, as we have seen that the ability to come up with good ideas is not necessarily proportionate to experience. Many times we have seen relatively seasoned advertising professionals fail to come up with a single usable idea – and here we have a bunch of young people with barely any advertising experience doing what the seasoned professionals could
not (in a span of 24 hours, might I add).

I am among said happy team members, as this now means the pressure on me decreases significantly.

On a less happy note, I have been reprimanded once again for not being diplomatic enough in this journal. This is particularly frustrating, as I only created this journal to provide an honest perspective on advertising today. Having to constantly walk on eggshells so as to not offend anyone undermines the very purpose of this journal. However, I understand that diplomacy is important and I will attempt to be even more diplomatic than I currently am just to be extra sure that there is absolutely no possibility of someone taking offence to the things I write.

Whenever I have had the opportunity to discuss advertising with acquaintances of mine who work in traditional agencies, they always say one thing – the creative team is given many liberties and is always pampered. Humour Me’s creative team receives no such special treatment. Being part of a creatively led organisation like ours means that quite often the creative team ends up working long hours, dealing with a never ending series of tight deadlines, and constantly feeling the pressure to deliver unique and innovative ideas. For the better part of this week, the creative team began their day at 9.30 am and did not leave the office until after 8 pm. I must also stress on the fact that these hours were not a result of us fooling around and wasting time – this was another thing my advertising acquaintances told me about creative teams in conventional agencies – but a consequence of continuously working, trying to tackle a challenging work load in a short period of time.

I’m glad to report that we finished all the work we were supposed to do.
This week we were visited by one of our clients. After the meeting between the senior team and the client was over, I was called upon to entertain the client with some piano playing. I obliged, and was strongly reminded of my childhood in which I was frequently forced to play the piano or violin for many of the guest that visited (however, I was quite shy as a child and would often stubbornly refuse to play anything until the guests took pity on me and let me go). The client – who was Arctic Fox, by the way – was very appreciative of my playing. I showed them what the sound score of our latest animation film sounded like in its earliest stage, and they liked it so much that they asked for it to be put on their social media pages! Here is what we published: