Robin Stam, Duval Guillaume Brussels

Yigit and I standing in our new agency

There are only two interesting organisations in Brussels: the European Parliament and advertising agency Duval Guillaume. And considering I'm not interested in politics, it doesn't take a genius to figure out why I'm working in the city that I hate most.

Okay, enough about Brussels. I know I've seen only the worst places of Brussels during my internship last year. But I've seen enough. When I signed the contract for Duval Guillaume, I knew I had to live somewhere else. And the city is: Antwerp. Why Antwerp? For a lot of reasons: people speak Dutch, it's close to Holland, there's a lot of activities of the agency there is a vivid atmosphere there.

On my first days in my new apartment I knew that I had made the right decision. This city is as alive as can be. It has a great shopping area with beautiful buildings. The nightlife is good as well. There are really good clubs here with famous underground DJ's from all over the world on the agenda.

But before this post starts to look like a promotion for the city of Antwerp, I'll tell something about the negative things. One thing I cannot stand is bureaucracy. And unfortunately, Antwerp is full of it. If I want to buy a train subscription I have to fill in so much forms that they can track down my entire life story. In order to get a credit card or internet at home you have to declare your address at the local government. But there they are behind with all their work and they're obviously too lazy to make a printout of my new address. So tomorrow I have to wait in line to get a ticket that allows me to come back next month!

In the meanwhile, work at Duval Guillaume started from day 1. We have to do a lot already, but that is actually a good thing. It keeps people like me and my teammate Yigit sharp. We haven't had one boring day in Duval and even though half of the employees have been replaced, everybody is still as nice as when I left the agency a year ago.

It's a noisy and chaotic agency. But the level of creativity and the amount of production is very high. It's not hard to figure out why Duval is one of the best agencies in Europe and why there are three big shelves full of awards in every size and shape that you can imagine. And they actually managed to sell my anti-spam campaign (see my other blog robinstam.blogspot.com) to one of their clients. It's even hanging in the bathrooms of all the big agencies in Belgium.

People who know me very well, know that I always go for my gut feeling. It led me to Stockholm last year, where I've made half of my Miami Ad School portfolio. And it also led me to Brussels. Correction: it led me to one of this particular agency in Brussels. There's no doubt in my mind that I made the right decision and as soon as we are used to our new situation, I'm sure that Yigit and I are going to explode.

As you can read in the the description of my blog, I'm passing over this blog to somebody else every week. I'm going to keep it a surprise who the new writer of next week will be, but I can promise that it will be worth reading.