Present Joys

Everybody was up by 9am on tuesday morning; we had continental breakfast (read: bagels and coffee) in the hotel lobby, said goodbye to Mamo, and headed off for One Show-organized “agency tours”. Over the course of the day, we visited four Manhattan agencies:

• Strawberry Frog, a small agency in a Madison Avenue penthouse. Though the agency people were pleasant, the visit was very poorly organized and we didn’t really see much of the work space, except for a conference room. Besides the nine CCAD young ones, there was about fifteen other students, who ended up being at all four of the studio visits we did. They were nice people, but some of their personalities were a little grating, especially after hours of walking around the city. Anyway… back to tuesday…
• We toured Deutsch Inc. next, at noon. The space had a beautiful view of the Hudson and the Statue of Liberty. We went on a very quick tour, but spent most of our time in a conference room hearing from a designer and a copywriter. After Deutsch, we dithered around trying to figure out lunch plans; when nothing seemed to materialize, we took the subway to SoHo for our next tour.
• Code and Theory, the next one, was the coolest tour of the day—a mostly-digital agency with amazing offices on Broadway, filled with nice hardwood floors and Persian rugs and lots of art books. We wandered around their space for a bit and then listened to a content strategist explain a very attractive recent project. It was tons of fun.
• From there, we took an extremely long trip through Times Square to visit Ogilvy, which was, sadly, the worst tour of the day. Most of the time was wasted showing us Ogilvy’s impressive on-site gym and video production facilities, which we didn’t really care about. There was a top-notch rooftop patio, though, and it was nice to experience that. By the time we got up there, we were all pretty checked out of the tour thing.