Smoking and advertising.

One of the weird, Microsoft-generated agency phenomena is the proliferation of meetings. It's not unusual to look at your calendar in the morning and see every half hour block filled in with a meeting request, or even competing meeting requests.

I may be a voc clamatis in deserto (a voice crying in the wilderness) but I happen to believe that we have Microsoft to blame for all these meetings.

Here's what I mean. Years ago before Microsoft meeting maker if you wanted to show your ACD work, you walked down to her office and said "Florence and I have work to show you." She would look up from her desk and say something like, "let's meet after lunch, say 1:30."

And you would. Further, if she liked the work and deemed it ready to show account, she would call account and say, "can you come up now and see some work?" And account would come up and look at the work.

Now we set a time to review the work (ready or not.) And review it again. And then we have a time set to review it with the client. We have so many meetings not because we need them, but because we can set them.

Here we are in late 2010 when everyone is blathering about cost control and runaway expenses and we can't hop off the meeting train.

If I were a bit more inventive I'd create a wearble anti-meeting patch. It would infiltrate a drug into your bloodstream to help stop you from going to meetings. Meetings are like smoking. Everyone knows they should stop but no one does.