new media age celebrated its 15th birthday with a few drinks at a hand-picked location in Soho last week. But the magazine wasn’t the only industry veteran to turn 15. Search agency Tamar threw a dazzling party from the dizzying heights of the top floor at the Tate Modern. Guests sported fake ’I love Tamar’ tattoos on legs, breasts arms, and foreheads, and to a well-lubricated Gadders it even seemed the agency had pulled some strings to get Boy George to DJ for the party.
Tamar CEO and founder Tanya Goodin reminisced about one of her very first meetings, in which she tried to convey the idea of the internet to the marketing manager of Disney, who pointed to her weighty laptop and said, “So is the internet in there?”
Between birthday parties, Gadfly found time to pop out to the Vibrant Awards, where he overheard an amusing conversation between Mirror Online’s Paul Hood and one of the Vibrant Media founders about this week’s Cannes Lions ad festival. Hood was saying he couldn’t go on account of cuts at The Mirror. No such qualms for the guys at Vibrant, though, who are turning up on their yacht.
Still in ad land, Gadfly hears of an epic struggle in East London the other day, when Poke took on AKQA at football. Despite sporting a stylish kit and holding AKQA to one-all at half time, the final result of 4-1 to AKQA, in front of a crowd of 15, shows that the Poke squad has some work do.
Perhaps it would be better off developing a polo team (after all, didn’t their Nick Farnhill ride the 1,000km Mongol Derby?). Up in York last weekend, Summit Media held its annual Summit Cup, complete with polo, picnic lunch and circus party. That’s senior designer Ellie Shopova in her party frock (left above). Summit staff Marcus Colley, Tony Wesche, Hedley Aylott and Freddie Bethal (left below) beat Barracuda in a tense final that went to a golden goal. And the day raised over £1,000 for the William Doolin Foundation.
On the topic of money, as news comes through that Bebo has been sold for a modest amount, who better to sum up the experience than Xochi Birch? Gadfly thought these words of wisdom from Birch’s own Bebo profile summed up the situation perfectly: “Always remember, life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”
