Well, here we are again. Another year. Another CA Advertising Annual. Another chance to honor the most creative work in the business and, of course, to snipe at the competition and mutter things like “derivative,” “hack” and “dreck.”

Well, one thing I think we can all agree on is the year sure did go by fast. And if you ask me, too fast. Faster than the year before. And way faster than the year before that.

Which doesn’t come as any surprise to anyone since advertising itself seems to be traveling so fast these days that everything and everyone has become one enormous blur.

“Hey, wasn’t that Alex Bogusky?”

“No, I think it was Eric Silver.”

“I could have sworn it was Alex.”

“Well, maybe it was Alex. Kinda hard to tell. He was just one enormous blur.”

I think you’d be hard-pressed to disagree that there’s nary an advertising creative anywhere that isn’t being asked to do more in less time than ever before. Oh and yeah, I almost forgot, we still want to kick ass in the shows.

So it’s got me thinking. Has advertising gotten too fast for its own good? Have we lost something that used to be so important to us? Is faster hurting the work? Or has technology made it possible to do great work in a fraction of what it used to?

Carl Honore thinks he knows the answer. Carl doesn’t work in advertising. But if he did, I think I know exactly what he would say. That we’re all moving too fast. That as wonderful as the work in this year’s CA Advertising Annual is, we will never know what might have been, if only its creators could have slowed down.

I like Carl Honore. And I really like his book. It’s called In Praise Of Slowness: Challenging The Cult Of Speed. The premise is that society has gotten so fast that nothing has much value anymore. We eat too fast. We work out too fast. We drive too fast. We play too fast. We read too fast. We even have sex too fast.

And we think too fast.

This is a dangerous thing, my friends. By its nature, fast thinking is not thorough thinking. Yes, we’ve all heard the stories of the creative team staring down the barrel of the impossible deadline, when suddenly, kaboom. There it is. The monster concept. Seemingly handed to us on a silver platter. It happens. But can it always happen? And even if it could, do we really want it to?

Tom Monahan, president of the creativity training company, Before & After, has an exercise he uses in his classes. He gives everyone in the class a pad of yellow sticky notes. Then he gives them a creative problem to solve and tells them they’ve got three minutes to come up with as many ideas as they can, jotting down one idea on each sticky note. Each note is to be stuck to the previous note forming a chain.

At the end of the three minutes, he tells you to stop and look at the chain. More often than not, there’s a couple of pretty good ideas in there. Then he tells you to do it again. Come up with as many more ideas as you can in three more minutes.

Frequently, some of the biggest and best ideas happen in that second round. Yes, you could have stopped after three minutes. And OK, maybe you’d have a good idea or two. But how would you have ever gotten to that even bigger and better idea, if there had never been a round two? If you had settled for whatever came out of those first three minutes, you wouldn’t have.

I once did some TV for John Hancock. If there is another campaign in my portfolio that I’m prouder of, well, I can’t think of what that might be. A lot of planets had to fall into alignment for that campaign to happen. That, of course, is true for any campaign. But what a lot of people are surprised to find is that we had a bit more time than normal to work on that project. Six months to be specific.

Think about that. Six months. Needless to say, this is a long gestation period. But it was such a remarkable experience. You actually got to think things through. You could nibble off little snippets of thoughts and let them ferment in the back of your mind. You could question things. Shoot bullet holes in concepts. Try this. Try that. It had never happened to me before then and it has never happened since.

Well, of course, it hasn’t. Hancock and projects like it are an anomaly in advertising. Slow is a dirty word. Slow is a weak word. You want to think slow? Fine. Go check yourself into a monastery. Speed is the order of the day now. If you’re going to work in an agency, you are damn well going to put the pedal to the metal and damn the craft. You’re either on the train or you’re not. And it is, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, one obscenely fast train.