I am constantly amazed by the generosity, talent and work ethic of the people I meet

The NDAC is launching a portfolio program. Next. It's targeted at young guns. Copywriters and art directors who want to improve their book and their network. Jennifer Hohn and I volunteered to brand the program. We went through concepts. Laughed a lot. Wrote some scripts. When Brian asked me if I could guarantee that I could get the stuff produced, I said yes. But I was totally lying. I mean, who was going to make our ideas come to life?

I should have had more faith.

Soon Jim Elkin of Roshambo Films was producing and directing our videos for the club's YouTube page. (The first will be posted Monday.) Radical was getting us three great actors and Idolum was donating editing time. (And incidentally, Tom also offered to help out.)

David Mejias was shooting the poster campaign, with XYZ doing the retouching and Tewell Warren printing.

Justin McCammon and Taylor Beseda got all digital on the idea, with elements like the @nextcreatives smackdowns, nextcreatives.com, and a collaboration with Burns on a soon-to-be-released Facebook app.

And Gregg Bergan, Norm Shearer, Mike Sukle and Jonathan Schoenberg offered to donate their time to mold the next generation of Denver creatives.

Every single person I just mentioned has a crazy-stressful job and a loving family and who knows what else might be going on in their lives. But every single one of them believes that Next will help the career of a young creative who is just burning to be great. Every single one of them wants to make Denver a better market. Every single one of them deserves a giant round of applause. This is a good business we're in. And it's filled with good people. Believe it.

Advertising stuff of the year, according to me

National ad blog of 2008: I keep thinking about deleting AdPulp from my feeds. And then I notice that I bookmark it constantly.

Denver ad blog of 2008: The Egotist wins this one in a walk. They're so far ahead of everyone else that the only thing I can do is nitpick at the things I wish were different. (I wish the blog's multiple anonymous authors had different pseudonyms, so I could tell them apart. I wish the comments were threaded instead of flat. I wish there was a troll-rating system.)

National agency site of 2008: The Barbarian Group. So rich. So cool. So smart. So useful. So, so elegant.

Denver agency site of 2008: I don't know. The cool ones are hard to navigate. The elegant ones don't capture my imagination.

Local agency blog of 2008: Pure's Pure Thinking. They post frequent and interesting content. At times, they're they only agency that seems to be trying.

Blog I wish I wrote of 2008: Barbarian Group head of planning and strategy Noah Brier writes a blog much better than my own. It's sort of about advertising, sort of about the Internet, and mostly about whatever he wants.

Cool ad-like idea of 2008: See a cnn.com headline you like? One click and it's a t-shirt (not to mention a walking ad for CNN). This genius brought to you by - you guessed it - the Barbarian Group.

Cool spot of 2008: "Fate" is a statement about life's glory and inevitability. Nike, David Fincher and Wieden + Kennedy put a lump in my throat that I don't think will ever go away.

30days30pieces.com

David Schell and Ryan Lee both let me know through Facebook that 30days30pieces.com is back. I see John Johnston in the mix, too.

Our House: A good play, a few years too late

[Ed. - This post contains spoilers for Our House, a play by Theresa Rebeck that premiered at the DCPA. I decided not to publish until the Denver run concluded to avoid giving away the plot. You've been warned.]

I liked Our House a lot while I was watching it. The writing was snappy. The direction was gripping. The actors were committed. The moral - TV is bad, TV news is worse, and reality TV will rot your brain - was right out of a college lecture on hyperreality, but it's a good lecture and I needed to hear it again.

Still, there was something that bothered me about the play. And reading through my playbill, I figured out what it was. I'd watched Our House's world premiere. But it didn't feel current.

Ken at Pure Thinking was all over an article titled "Young prefer MySpace to TV." He wrote:

When asked how they would rather spend 15 minutes, 45% of this age group answered social networking sites, surpassing watching TV, reading, talking on the phone, or playing video games.

Today, wannabe celebs turn to the Internet, not broadcast. (See: Samberg, Andy and Tequila, Tila.) So when Our House's Merv started blowing away his roommates, I expected him to put video on his YouTube channel. When he demanded to talk to the news anchor who hosts his favorite reality show, the play seemed dated.

This thread points out that Our House was inspired by the story of Julie Chen, who anchored the CBS morning news and has hosted Big Brother since 2000.

2000. That's sounds about right. Eight years ago, Our House might have been vital. But today Real World is in it's 19th season and nobody I know trusts the TV for news anyway.

For me, the play felt like a look back at a quaint time when TV still ruled.

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.