The Buffalo Ad Club recently held its annual Awards Show. The whole thing seemed to have come off really well.  Tod Martin and his group did a great job…and I’m acutely aware of the burden and enormous effort it takes to put on one of these things.  I’m also a witness to how badly these things can go.  Anyone who steps up and agrees to take on this task deserves a genuine thank you, regardless of the disasters that can take place.

As always, we’re told, and we know, the show is about the work.  It says that right in the show book. That’s why we go, to see the work.  Actually, that’s not the whole truth.  We go to see each other…to look for a writer to replace the one that just left or a new account manager to go after more work.  We quietly look around to find that next shop to work at.

And some of us, more than a few, go to see old friends, sometimes old friends we only see once a year at the show.  In a business where tenure can be fleeting, the Ad Club is often the constant in our professional and ever evolving careers.  A long time ago Dick Day at Healy Schutte & Comstock told me that it takes a long time to make an old friend.  I’m now old enough to know the value of what he said.

We work in a business, a category, rife with characters that we need to work with to compete against others to earn a living. We count on each other, we get tight, we become great friends; and if we’re smart and talented, we spend years working together.   That’s the fun of this business–that’s why we go to the show.

Previous posts in this blog were primarily intended to pass along helpful comments to agency account people.  Spend enough time in this business and you have to pick up a point or two that’s worth passing along.  I tend to follow Robert Solomon’s blog.  Solomon, author and longtime serious ad guy, wrote that his posts were intended to be helpful, but recently had become a repository for memories, memorials and milestones.  I think that’s where I’ve arrived.  Not the author part, but long-time ad guy…with a lot of great friends.