Liveblog: NDAC planning session

8:53 a.m. I am at the NDAC's planning meeting. It's an all-day funfest of pod updates and work sessions. There are about 25 people from Karsh, Cactus, TTD and so forth. Got a question or concern? Let me hear it in the comments. I'll try to update throughout the day.

10:29 a.m. Break time. Lots of yapping on the costs associated with running a nonprofit. SWOT analysis. That sort of thing. Apparently the national club wishes we did the ADDYs instead of TD50.

12:20 p.m. Please let lunch come soon. I gave a little speech on the state of the Creative Pod, which was mostly babbling about TD50. Gave thanks to Texture, Pure and Amatucci, among others.

2:02 p.m. Group breakouts. How do we increase relevance to members? Does the pod structure add value or just confuse everyone? How can we help students, causes and job seekers?

ADCD photos online

Photos from the ADCD award show are at Bryce Boyer Productions. Now then, would you rather check out Norm's happy face or Creative Sourcebook's seriously hot, mostly naked models?

Gamekillers premieres tonight on MTV

Why am I blogging this? Maybe because Bartle Bogle Hegarty executive creative director Kevin Roddy judged The Denver 50. Which makes us BFF.

But there's another reason Gamekillers is worth talking about. It's an example of a big idea - the sort of idea that TD50 was designed to reward. It's more than just a three-spot campaign. It's an intricate web of sites and print and now a TV show that has inspired wikipedia entries and blog postings and buzz all over. Gamekillers is a good example of where advertising is in the year 2007. Oh, and it looks funny as hell, too.

2007 ADCD award show

The Art Directors Club of Denver gives good award show. Always has. Last night was no exception.

The big winners in the ad categories were Cactus and Integer. Some other shops also took home multiple awards, like John Amatucci, Vermillion, Lee Reedy and Pure Brand.

In his opening remarks, club president James Pelz said some nice things about the New Denver Ad Club, of which I'm an overactive member. I want to return the favor. When we were planning TD50, we started by agreeing that ADCD was already doing a killer multi-discipline show. We didn't see any point in duplicating their efforts. So TD50 partially owes its structure to the ADCD. There's no excuse for agencies not to enter both shows.

Be that as it may, my agency sat out this year. But Thomas Taber & Drazen, where I worked up until last month, entered a couple things. And our - or is it "their," now? - 2006 print campaign for Colorado Farm Bureau Insurance took home silver and judge's choice awards. Stephen Curry, creative director of Lewis Communications wrote:

What makes this campaign refreshing is the simple credit it gives the reader for his/her own intelligence.

The best part of working on the campaign came after we sent final art out out to dozens of community newspapers across the state. We got media reps calling us to tell us our files were screwed up. The photo was too small. The headline was missing. That sort of thing. We had to reassure them that the files were fine. And our client deserves heaps of praise for saying yes to a very quiet campaign.

So it was a good night. And a tough act for the TD50 award show to follow.

Get another take on the evening from The Denver Egotist.