Thursday, May 8, 2008

One Show Recap

I'm blogging for the One Club at various events during their One Festival this week. Below is my latest post, future ones can be found here:

The Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center was one of the best advertisements of the evening. With 50 foot high floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on Columbus Circle and a three piece jazz band sounding like they were performing at Carnegie Hall the evening’s cocktail hour started out very promisingly. Somewhere around 600 people made their way to The One Show last night for the most distinguished advertising awards in the biz – and to throw a few back, flirt a bit and eat some appropriately name jumbo shrimp.

The event was a collection of very talented, eclectically dressed people of seemingly all persuasions. Some of the attendees wore suits or ball gowns while others could just have easily been banging away on their Macs in a Brooklyn coffee shop.

For me it was an interesting (and first extensive) look into the advertising industry and an opportunity to collect business cards like I was having a raffle for a free lunch at the end of the evening.

“At One Show events the people who have come up want to help the people who are coming up,” said Phil Growick, the Managing Director at Jerry Fields Associates (A Company of The Howard, Sloan, Koller Group according to his business card).

And it really did seem like that. At one point I was talking with a guy (Greg Hahn from BBDO) who looked like a less mysterious version of Jack White just having a casual conversation and later he collected an award for the HBO Voyeur ads – the coolest of the night in one man’s estimation.

“It’s the best of the best,” Hahn said. “There’s a lot of inspiration here and you get to see the gold standard of the advertising industry.”

The awards themselves were hosted by Tom Papa who was funnier off the cuff than scripted. And the music played throughout the show was Vampire Weekend type, super hip, but not in a too-cool-for-school-kind-of-way stuff.

All in all a very cool show, and some of the better adverts I’ve seen this side of five or six Super Bowl’s ago.

Check back in tomorrow for a recap of the Student Awards Show.