Friday, November 05, 1999

It's a Brand New Era.com

Jiggling white balls speckled with glistening green sauce floated around the room on silver trays. "Mozzarella with Pesto?" "Oh, I must try one of these!" crooned SmartGirl.com's Isabel Walcott. Just after she popped one into her mouth, Lois Whitman (pres. & COO, HWH PR) gathered Isabel, Robert Aronoff (EVP, GM BrandEra.com) and Marvin Igelman (pres. & CEO) for a picture. The One Club was the enclave for the launch of BrandEra.com on Monday, November 1st. With logos and advertising like the Tide Detergent box, BrandEra.com promises to be the marketplace for marketers, as Michel Neray (VP/marketing/chief content officer) explained to me.

Featuring adsGallery.com, portfolios.com, medialot.com and the mediaXchange.com on the site, this savvy web team aspires to create the community and commerce needed and useful for marketers. Earlier in the evening I met Edward Salzano (CTO) and Richard Murphy (sales) of Invision talking with William "I don't need to talk to press, I'm in the 'Times' all the time" Cashen (engineering manager, production dept., NYTimes). And so Ad people and interactive marketers mingled with others interested in this world, including freelancer Meredith Bergman and Independent Pictures assistant CFO Erin Heidenreich.