New pictures

Interesting guerilla stunt on a traffic sign

As I said in my previous post, a lot of my New York photographs have died in the computer crash. Luckily, Julien had some of my pictures on his laptop. So he burned a CD for me with everything that could interest me. One of the pictures was the one above. At the first glance, it looked like a normal traffic sign. But the letters 'HIV' under the word 'STOP' makes this a really interesting picture. An good example of spontaneous guerilla marketing for AIDS-prevention.

We're spending too much time between four walls in the agency (this is meant as a figure of speech, because we actually sit in the corridor). So we decided to go out more to show our work to agencies in New York.

So this week we put our favorite work together and went to two agencies: MMB and Duval Guillaume New York. At MMB a former Miami Ad School student named Jeremy Kinder gave us detailed advice on our portfolio. Something which we can use very well because next quarter we have to put our final portfolio's together in Hamburg.

I already knew Duval Guillaume from my internship in Brussels, but I've never been to the agency in New York. We spoke to Tom van Dale. This 26-year young creative director already knew a lot of our work, but we just had a good conversation. Duval New York is, in contrary to the mother agency in Brussels, still very small. He told us that he has big ambitions to make the New York agency a really creative shop with a lot of employees. And that, with all its intensity and creativity, New York is the place where that's possible.

Talking about intensity, Jeremy Kinder told us that after working for a couple of years in New York, he really had to take a long rest, because he didn't have one day of rest. I can imagine that. Monday we have a vacation day. Both Julien and I are really enthousiastic workers, but we were somehow glad to have a day off for a change. New York is really intense. The noise in Manhattan sometimes drives me crazy. The subway trains for example, are so loud that I can't hear the music on my iPod when they drive by. But in the end an awesome city like this can get away with being too loud and being too fast. Because you know it's going to be crazy time when you go here. If you join a marathon, you know you have to run.