The Friday before last was Shish and Sam from DDB’s 10 year creative
anniversary. They held a large celebratory lunch at The Fat Badger in 
Notting Hill. Everyone who came got them romantic cards, anniversary gifts and even a special iced cake arrived. The traditional
gift for a 10 year anniversary present is ‘tin’, so Lol and I gave them
some ‘tin tin’ books.

It got me (Nat) thinking that our
advertising relationships should be just as honoured and celebrated as
marriages. You spend more time with your creative partner than your
real partner anyway.

Creative partnerships can be difficult at
times. They take work. (A creative director I spoke to recently said
that with some
creative teams he had to act like a marriage guidance counsellor). I
think creatives should have anniversary parties more often and we
should get our partners gifts and cards each year to say how much we
mean to one other. Why only do it for real relationships?

We’d like to know – what are the most important
things that keep a creative relationship going? For a partnership to work, there are so many things that you have to have
in common. Most importantly sense of humour, then ambition. If one of
you is happy to settle for a worse job so they can get a mortgage and
the other will happily live with their parents until their dream job
comes along, then there may be problems. You’ve also got to share the same
work ethic. Otherwise one of you will always be bitter that you are
working harder. And another obvious thing is you’ve both got to share a
similar creative appreciation of ideas otherwise you will produce work
that one of you isn’t happy with. But then again a lot of people say
successful relationships are when two very opposite people come
together. Different views fuse together making more interesting
work.

Are
creatives meant to find a soul mate or is it better to play the
creative field?
Do you get lazy with the same partner and stop making as much effort as
you did when you first met? Do you lose the drive to impress them? (I
always thought it would be a fun Nabs fundraising idea to do a partner
swap week or a swinging month).

Who holds the record for the longest lasting partnership?
And who has the shortest? Also, we’ve touched on this whole issue before
in our Ménage à trois blog, but has anyone ever strayed, or been tempted to have an affair?

And
how do you know when you’ve met ‘the one’? Is there someone out there
for every creative that is your perfect creative match?  Does anyone
have any stories about how they or their creative partner ‘proposed’? When
I was with my old partner Danni, when we got together 7 years ago she
‘proposed’ to me in Amsterdam in a fairground with a jelly ring. I
accepted. But then 7 years later we divorced, divided up our idea
belongings and went our separate ways. And that was when I met Lol
online…

After being with one partner it made me realize what I
wanted more from the next partner. I knew a bit more about what my
‘type’ was and what I was looking for in my dream man or woman. So when
I put my ‘profile’ up online on the single creatives d&ad site I
was quite specific as to what I wanted.

From Lol’s point of view, having been solo for much of her
career, she’s ‘dated’ lots of people but no-one seemed quite right
until her first ‘date’ with Nat, where it was ‘love at first sight’. I guess for both of us it’s a mixture of being industrious, reliable, and each having something the other person doesn’t… so you’ve got to end up greater than the sum of your parts.

It’s mine and Lol’s one
year anniversary in December. So ‘paper’ themed presents will be
greatly appreciated. How about a nice layout pad?
And on that theme, if
in wedding anniversaries the common gifts are based on tin, silver,
gold, diamond, crystal, sapphire etc, then what should the equivalent
be for advertising anniversaries? Should the presents be stationery
themed? Pencils, pen, magic tape then stapler?

To those who aren’t as lucky in love as Shish or Sam, we’ll end with a bittersweet  little film about how creative break-ups are never easy…