According to a 1997 document the Advertising Club of Atlanta was begun in 1909, headed by a gentleman of unknown vocation named Tom Brannon. It started with 25 members, which was considered a promising beginning considering that the term "advertising agency" wasn't completely in the public lexicon.

When researching a story on the Atlanta ad community for this very publication back in 2003, I went digging for further history of ad club. The best I could do was a mention in The Atlanta Constitution from 1910, announcing a meeting of the group.

The clipping announced a meeting of the Atlanta Advertising Men's [italics mine, and I have no idea why it was added to the title] Club, bragging that its membership was "100 strong." The article touted a program on the virtues of retail advertising. The catch was that the speakers were all on the client side, but in fairness there were probably few advertising agencies of any description.

Back in the day ad agencies were actually what we now look at as media-placement firms, with most clients providing the art and copy. Indeed, there were only 18 shops listed in the Atlanta market by Southern Advertising and Markets (which later became Adweek) as of 1936.

The club flourished after World War Two, when returning veterans got their degrees, settled in Atlanta and began the process of making the city the business hub of the Southeast.

According to past president Don Elliott Heald, the Ad Club was a rallying point for the fledgling community. Back then the club was a venue for the agencies to socialize, an agent that brought the community together.

I became aware of the Atlanta Ad Club (I have no idea when they dropped the word "Men's" out of their title, but I'm sure it didn't face much intelligent opposition) when I joined Adweek as a reporter in November, 1984.

I came to the magazine with a background that included working as a news and sports writer, a radio news reporter and a media columnist. What I knew about advertising could bit scribbled on those little notepads they put on the tables at Bones.

So I learned about advertising the old-fashioned way Ð I kept my mouth shut (for the most part) and kept my ears and eyes open. As such, the Ad Club provided a golden opportunity to meet people and pick up the language as I went along.

My first event with the club would be the Addys early the following year (1985), the invitation to which was a video (delivered on a 3/4-inch cassette that is probably in a museum by now) featuring the usually somber and soft-spoken Jim Pringle decked out in a faux Mohawk. I didn't know Pringle from Ogilvy but clearly things had progressed in some fashion since 1909.

Around the same time I came to Adweek Ð the previous year (1983) Ð some folks in the creative community staged a bloodless revolution and formed the Creative Club of Atlanta.

If memory serves, CCA was formed because many in the creative community (art directors, copywriters, photographers, illustrators, etc.) felt their needs were not being met by the Ad Club. The prevailing feeling at the time was Ð fair or unfair -- that ad club had become the province of "the suits" and that a separate organization was needed to talk the creatives.

My first CCA function was ShowSouth at some point in the mid-80s. The person who was to organize the show was having some serious problems on the personal front and with three weeks to go, essentially, there was no show. A program called "The Show from Hell" was thrown together and lasted less than an hour, which didn't seem to bother anyone.

Overall, my impression from the outside looking in was that the Ad Club was a fairly serious bunch bent on building and enhancing the local community, and the Creative Club was a fairly earnest bunch, bent on improving the city's creative product.

And based on hanging out with both organizations, the two could work the hell out of an open bar.

As an outsider, both looked to be accomplishing their goals. Indeed, in spite of their differences they operated on parallel courses. Programs and philosophies aside, both were intent on making Atlanta a better advertising community.

In 1999 I went out on my own, and free of conflict of interest concerns, I was able to do something with the Ad Club and the CCA that I could never do in 16 years at Adweek, and that was to join both groups. My first year both clubs were nice enough to bring me inside the tent to serve on their boards.

Around this time I found out something that I never would have learned had I continued to observe from a distance. Both clubs were made up of people who deeply cared about their profession and community.

How else could you explain the involvement of people whose jobs kept them more than busy on a daily basis? Working with the clubs was equal to taking on a second job, often working two full-time jobs. While it's true some people work with the club to spiff up their resume or network, I found that those people didn't last too long and the ones who got things done were the ones who weren't looking for a public pat on the back.

And it was also around this time that conversations began to increase in frequency and volume that it might be time to merge the clubs and bring the community back together.

Any schism, if that is the proper term, seemed to have abated. Both clubs were getting by fine, but there was now a feeling that combining the membership and resources would offer the community more.

I believe it took close to three years to finally make it happen. The first year was consumed by both boards trying to make sense of merging while taking care of their own business. The second was playing "what if" and the third was actually bringing the two boards together.

In the summer of 2003, fairly described as the dark period for both organizations, the clubs merged and Creativity Atlanta was the result.