Beauty is exuberance pt. 2

Ok, sorry I haven't been blogging at all, really, for a couple of weeks. I have made up for this, I think, by being an incredibly prolific adman.

In fact, I reckon I might be in the running for the creative with the most print ads in print this year. I'm fairly serious about this.

For instance, the last freelance bit I was doing was retail/headline based stuff. I don't feel any shame about this. Pictures of products and facetious word play may look a bit 1978, but as a technique it still offers the most efficient creativity:speed ratio of any kind of advertising.

You can spend Tuesday and Wednesday polishing headlines until they really zing, slap'em under some pictures of dishwashers or whatever and have a half page ad in all the papers on Sunday. You'll get a certain amount of input from the client and the Creative Director, but assuming they buy your lines you'll also really own the ads. It's your bit that makes them good, it's your bit that makes them different.

So I did about 7 of them.

Bosh.

Then since I came into this agency I've done a total of 13 press ads for various clients. When I say I did them, I mean I did enough of them that I could put them in my book and not be ashamed to show any of the, incidentally, superb people I worked with that I had done so. Ok, about seven of them were for a single campaign, out this weekend, that was admittedly quite a lot more labour intensive for the illustrator and designer than it was for me. Three were retail. One or two 48 sheets are still in process. A couple of thoroughgoing press ads - one of which is probably my favourite to date.

Bosh.

So that makes 20 ads since January in a year in which I also managed to get made redundant and spend two months on the dole playing Spore.

That's as well as six articles and one feature in Jeffrey Dahmer Magazine and one and a half short stories.

Apart from my nakedly sounding off about how I'm a major cultural force and basically decide what you think about everything, there are some general conclusions one can draw from all this:

• Copywriters thrive in a recession. This is because people stop dicking around and start wanting to sell things again.
• You produce more under the lash of capitalism than you ever would through mere self-appreciation.
• That it's worth having an ideology, even if it's just to not make things that are demeaning, because you may feel like what you're doing makes no difference, but if you're doing lots of it and not paying attention the aggregate effect of your thoughtlessness will be to make the world an uglier place.