You can just hear all the Brits cheering right now. Finally all the Australians out of London.
Alberts, Poynton and now Davis.

Welcome home Craig. You probably forgot how bitchy, petty and average the industry is back here.

GPY&R DaviSydney?

Is Craig going to head up JWT Creative in Oz?? That could be exciting!

Patts indeed. Good score!

well he wouldn't exactly be among equals at JWT Sydney

interesting first half of 2008 at clems....singing smiths musical at the beach, plus that weird birthday mitsubishi ad .....whats goin on?

10.29......the answer is... the same as usual......deeply ordinary work,at best, from Clems.

8.42, JWT scored a heap of Lions at Cannes, but it is true, most of the good ones have left.

Um...he's leaving JWT so I'm guessing he's not going to JWT.

7.17am... Do you think he would be among 'equals' if they had stayed?

7.17am...i heard the team who's won most of the Lions are still there...wonder where they're going next.

I don't get this one at all.

The old family reasons caper.

If he's done such a great job for JWT why doesn't he run the JWT world from Sydney? There are plenty of people based here running worldwide empires so why shouldn't he?

9.50, I can't see Craig going to work early to get hold of another Kellogg brief.

JWT is Singos except they can't even please their clients or make money.

Doesn't anyone here follow anything other than advertising? The UK economy is going to shit in a big way. People are talking about recession and that means big cuts in advertising spending. It's self-preservation. Craig is just getting out before JWT UK starts bleeding too heavily. Unfortunately he'll arrive here just as our economy starts falling apart. Incidently, If you haven't sold your house already and decided - at least in your mind - what you will be doing in your post-advertising career you are either very good or very stupid.

i gotta say, some of you people don't know shit

Maybe he's just done all he needs to do in this industry and it's time for a reality check. I've worked for him, there's nothing more he needs to prove in these big multi nationals, and why wouldn't you want to move back to Australia and put your life first. Good luck Craig, you're an inspiration.

Craig Davis is a gentleman and a top bloke. He gave of his time very, very generously when last living in Oz and I'm sure he'll do the same again.

Welcome home Craig, and good luck.

Thanks for the advice 9.42. But I don't think I'll be selling my house, which is an appreciating asset, just because a global slowdown is looming.

Here's a tip for you though: economic slowdowns are the best time to accumulate assets, not get rid of them.

1:18 Family reasons are totally valid - on your last day of the planet you aint gonna which you had spent more time with your work collegues in the office.

1:18,

"The old family reasons caper."

It seems by this statement that you have been around for a while in the industry and have seen this reason before. It is probably because it is at least partially true.

There is no way you make it to the position that Craig made without serious personal sacrifice. I have never met Craig, don't know if he's married, divorced, children, parents, an uncle or a godfather, but if he is any of these, his family role is far more important than any role in advertising.

Sure you won't get in magazines, you won't even get 50k bonus' for quarterly objectives, but he'll have a relationship with family that actually means something more than another text message late at night:

"anthr fkn pitch. B L8 2nite again.

So if you are at the stage in your life where you can say to yourself hey I have 2 years from now till 2010. In that time I want to get a gold lion. Good on you. Guess what I reckon Craig may have sait that to himself in 2005 and he's done what he came for and got out on top.

Not at the end of his life with a broken marriage, and kids raised by daycare and PS3.

There is more to life than Gold lions and advertising.

Either way he doesn't look that happy to be coming home.

Craig proves that hard work can get you to huge places.
When he was in Australia he worked at a crap place and never did anything remarkable.

welcome home mate. You and all our other Aussie friends OS, do us proud.

9.45am. I hope your ads are better than your understanding of the current credit crunch. Your house is no longer an appreciating asset but part of a collapsing global Ponzi scheme dreamt up by the banks to create liquidity on the back of worthless commercial paper.

collapsing global ponzi scheme my arse. economic conspiracy theory more like it.

residential property prices in australia are propped up by two factors: firstly, our cities are designed like a huge target with a nice bullseye in the middle (where everyone wants to live) and the shit suburbs in a 30km ring around it. secondly, our population is in nett growth, not decline.

put those two factors together, and if you own residential real estate within 8-10km of the CBD, you own an asset that will continue to appreciate over the medium to long term. The fact is there is a shortage of housing stock in areas well serviced by transportation, schooling, health services, restaurants, sporting stadiums and shopping precincts.

despite the collapse of the lending sector in the US, I think I'm going to do ok. Don't think I'd be so confident if I owned a bunch of 200k homes in the outer west of Sydney. But I don't.

But 5.42. Current prices reflect previous access to exceptionally cheap credit, produced as a by-product of the massive worldwide securitisation of Residential-Mortgage Backed Securities and Asset Backed Commercial Paper. Without this money, prices must and will adjust to the new supply. This process of deleverage is occurring in every western market which has previously seen spectacular (but fundamentally unwarranted rises). Australia is one of these markets.

12.52,

Craig proves that being friends with Dave Droga can get you to huge places.

So refreshing. Let's make this a blog about real estate rather than advertising. We could share the knowledge and all be set for retirement. Makes a nice change to all the bitching about who's doing what and who's getting credited.

Ad wankers talking about real estate prices in Sydney. No way!

wow,

One of our best announces he is moving back to Australia and some people want to talk property.

I wouldn't mind talking about property.

No matter how much cash I earn, it seems I need over seven hundred thousand just to live in an area with decent coffee.

It's fucked. Fucked I tell ya.

Don't worry 8.46.

According to 6.56, all you have to do is wait for the great global collapse and you'll be able to pick up a 3 level warehouse in Surry Hills, complete with a cantilevered lap pool, for 250k.

Never mind that there are far more people wanting to buy inner city than there are properties for sale... never mind that our population is growing but the supply of housing isn't... the whole market is on the brink of disaster, only propped up artificially by a convoluted series of paper schemes.

9.34am

Not quite true. Those sort of properties will always attract a premium and your average 120K a year creative will never be able to afford one. They're for the likes of Crag Davies. The problem with the last few years of cheap credit is that normal ad people have been tricked into believing that they can afford aspirational stuff and that it is somehow their right. So they have overreached themselves and taken on far too much debt. They are the ones who will be fucked. From here on - but especially from the early part of next year, the banks will be tightening lending standards even more and the whole flow of liquidity that has driven prices upwards will dry to a trickle. If I were a betting man, I would be looking at Northern Beaches around Jan-Feb. There is a lot of speculative overleverage there currently, betting on it becoming the next big thing. Pick them up cheap as they flood on the market post-christmas

Buy in New Zealand. I's cheap as chups bro

http://www.trademe.co.nz/Trade-Me-Property/Residential-Property/Houses-for-sale/auction-161533704.htm

Take your money out of property and put it where?

Into cash?

Hmmm, it's either eaten by inflation or declining interests desperately trying to pump life into a moribund economy.

That's the beauty of economics.

Everything has an opportunity cost.

Including crapping on on this blog.

Back to work...

8:46, worrying about good coffee is very 90's. Prior to that no one cared or new the difference, so stop being a gay wanker! Personally i'd say you need around a mil to live anywhere that's not shit.

I bought my place ages ago. I didn't over stretch. I paid it off. It's worth over a mil now. Go and get fucked.

4.08. You may have paid outright, but the legion of hopeless specufestors and yuppie wannabes that moved in all around you as you and your ilk forced the decent people out of your neighbourhood in yet another urban "renaissance" are about to go into meltdown, pushing down the price of their places and yours in the bargain. As their houses lie empty, the squatters and vandals will move in, eventually targeting neighbouring properties like yours. Hope you've got good insurance.

I rob nice big houses like yours.

what the flying fuck are you on 4.37?

credit crunches... oil shocks... recessions... corrections... the global economy has seen them all over the past century, yet amazingly the developed world has yet to descend into the kind of anarchy you describe.

shit - if we listened to every scare-mongering theorist who told us the sky was about to fall, we'd never invest in nor own anything.

are you just trying to make yourself feel good about the fact that you don't own property?

Hey 4:37. The whole world's doomed! Didn't you know? Fire, floods, pestilence, freaks writing posts on campaign brief... It's all in the last chapter of that kids book, the bible.

You miserable bunch of shits. Move on for fuck's sake...

Hey 5.32

I think that's why craig is moving back to Oz. (sorry to bring it back to the original subject)

4.37.
How many people on this blog will be retrenched in the coming tsunami?

actually combining the Craig news with the real estate comments is perfect.
it raises a real question. How many people in our industry make real money?
I mean real, don't have to worry about losing their job type of money? we are such a month to month industry that lives large on reasonably high salaries but never puts anything away. We are not an industry that creates wealthy people. We drive fast cars, rent big houses, eat at expensive places and that's it.
Does someone have to be as political as Singo to make a buck?

8.28am

Good question.

We act like we are rich but fuck'd if we are.
Do we have to leave and work OS to afford a good life in Australia?
I guess Davis will answer that question for us when he returns. Does he need to work and if so where?

if you don't want to wake up one day being 50years old and driving a taxi, wondering what the fuck happened, here's what you need to do:

work hard. don't spend every cent you earn. save up for a deposit to buy a house in a decent area. try to get as much equity in that house as you can. don't eat out all the time. don't drive an expensive car. learn how to be happy when you're not spending money. when you can, start your own agency with people you trust. work even harder. don't do coke. try and do good work, but more importantly, get your agency profitable, and sell it to a network. work for the required 3 years post-sale. then get the fuck out of this industry and into something a little less stressful (like air-traffic control) before it kills you.

9.37am.

So very true.
how many you reckon have done that?

I guess he's realised that he always had the power to come back to Oz. There's no place like home.

We make good coin, I have for over 15 years.

Unless you start you own agency, become an ECD or go back to school, this industry will spit you ( and me ) out sooner or later. So, if you really are creative have a plan, apply your creativity to other profitable areas and don't forget, It's just advertising.
If you're earning over 100k and can't invest some of that, you probably aren't smart enough to be responsible for spending you're clients budget either.

12:27 if you're writing a post at 12:27 in the morning and don't know the difference between your clients budget and you're clients budget you probably aren't smart enough to be responsible for making comments either.

It's not how much you earn, it's how much you save.

This doesn't mean you have to use the sports section to wipe your arse but it does, I reckon, mean avoiding eating out at restaurants. In doing so, you'll avoid snooty waiters and tasteless overrated food. Oh yeah, and a $200 bill.

Little things add up to big things.

p.s I still haven't paid off my student loan

2:17 and 12:27,

It seems that neither of you are smart enough to know the difference between your clients budget and your client's budget? Or how about your clients' budgets?

Indeed, 3:21, it's a sad commentary on the appalling standard of what passes for literacy amongst what we might loosely describe as today's advertising practitioners.

It may well be a symptom of the more widespread malaise affecting yoof in general, but is inexcusable amongst the privileged elite working in the communications game.

It's truly cringe-worthy.

Love,

THE GRAMMAR AND APOSTROPHE POLICE