Drink More Coffee (and other stuff)

A ton of odds and ends over the last couple of days.

The She Monkey is now in Helsinki on business and had a hell of a time getting there. A mechanical problem forced a delayed flight that caused a cascade of missed connections across Europe and resulted in her arriving five hours late. I chatted with her a little today; she’d just had dinner and the sun was just setting in Helsinki… at 11:30 P.M.

I spent my first day of temporary bachelorhood bemoaning the US loss in the World Cup. We watched it at the agency– actually, we watch all the games at the agency and the only ones I’ve missed were two of the six played this past weekend. It’s a benefit of working with people from Latin America and, because we all have laptops and wi-fi, doesn’t result in as much lost productivity as you might think.

We presented three campaigns to the nice folks at 7-Eleven yesterday and, today, went into the studio to record a demo version of one of them. The demo’ed one is a nice campaign but relies on character performance to reach its full potential (whereas the other campaigns were clearly funny right on the page), so we felt a demo was needed in order to put the three on equal footing when they were passed around the office (and you know they always are).

The full effort will be breaking nationally next month.

I’m surprised George hasn’t picked up on this next little tidbit, but it looks like things are getting nasty between WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell and Yan Gang, chief executive at the Citic Guoan Group. Citic bowed out of their partnership with WPP in favor of Omnicom (yay, us) and had a few nice things to say about Sir Martin.

The Financial Times reported Thursday that the decision by the Chinese to suddenly switch Western partners, a year before their contract with WPP was to expire, stemmed from Mr. Yan’s belief that he had been treated rudely by Sir Martin when they met in London in April to discuss problems with the joint venture.

Mr. Yan addressed that Friday at a news conference in Beijing, Bloomberg News reported, saying that in the meeting, Sir Martin demonstrated that he “had absolutely no manners, no upbringing and no culture.” (NYTimes)

Ouch.

Finally, I now know why I drink so much coffee: it may help cut down on damage to your liver caused by excessive alcohol consumption.

Hell, I may live forever.

3 commentsEmail Article Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 09:31pm Mack Simpson

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