One Club's One Show

A mix between memory lane and eye-opening reality check was my experience at The One Club's One Show Interactive awards show at The Roxy on Thursday, March 11th. Sean Skilling, creative director at Brand Dialogue was in attendance with a small posse of beautiful BDers including a recent hire who insisted on calling me "Mrs. Pulitzer." Sean reported great growth and successes on many levels, even on a personal level citing the popularity of "the girls'" web site. "The girls" are his parrots and you can check 'em out at: www.inch.com/~sskiling. Striking Audrey Fleisher of Ogilvy Interactive also was surrounded by her team of talented suave creatives including Daymon Bruck, Scott Storrs, Josh Grossberg and Mach Arom from Ogilvy Interactive. Ogilvy had many reasons to celebrate considering they left with quite a few "pencils" (the award of the night) for e-culture campaign work for IBM. Peter Seidler showed me his silver pencil for outstanding work on Casio's Corporate Identity web site at Razorfish. Dara Tyson of MecklerMedia was there, and I caught up with Damon Torres of Robocast. Damon's new company automates everything on the web and they were streaming and cybercasting the event. Lee Nadler (president/ceo, lead sherpa, Digital Pulp), Gene Lewis (senior prod. manager, manager info. systems) and Vincenzo Sainato (assoc. creative director, interactive media, Siegle & Gale) were enjoying the sense of how this show and our industry has grown up. Steven Sacks (chief creative director, co-founder, Digital Pulp) and I also had a nice conversation regarding how his company is enjoying nice measured growth and quality creative work, as opposed to worrying about IPOs and such. Kiley Bates (Editor, Urban Desires.com) was quite smashing in a slinky powder blue halter top and pixie haircut. Jason Parkin of Blue Dingo and Mike Essl and I all marveled at the fantastical solo dancing by Jason Wurtzel, senior engineer at Nicholson NY. Tom Nicholson might have been doing a private jig himself, considering his company enjoyed the honor of Best of Show for best self-promotion with their snowball fight holiday card. So successful it was that apparently school teachers called requesting their school's IPs be blocked as students were playing the game as opposed to researching on the Net. Honestly, throwing snowballs doesn't seem so bad considering what else is out there. Kyle Shannon of Agency.com, Alice O'Rourke of NYNMA were among the glitterati presenters. And Mike Knowlton of Oven spoke for some of his co-workers including Leanne Fremar and Jurgen Altziebler as he exclaimed how this show is so terrific because "it brings together all the aspects of interactivity with huge, traditional firms and smaller privately held shops. It's so comprehensive and it shows that it's so much more than the web." Salute!