Found my way to the Commercial Tavern in Commercial Street - an interesting pub whose choice of background music tended towards the ironic - Rolf Harris followed by Johnny Cash followed by the Great Escape - I wonder what the clientele really listen to? Then wandering around talking to complete strangers who think Beersphere sounds alarming and account planning sounds like a cult. But then I found Chris Forrest - and Aaron and Martin from Storey and it all started to fall into place. Considering the call had gone out from Faris I had assumed he would be there but now he has a new impressive job title he'd had to vamoose and run the New York beersphere instead (as you do) there seem to be a bit of oneupmanship in choosing which continent you will beersphere on - I noticed that Charles Frith managed the Australian one. The best I could do was to call Elena Ionita hosting the Bucharest one in the newly restored venue of the Amsterdam Cafe.
By this time I Mark Earls was in the house and from there the evening went into a blur - hi to Andreas from of DDB and Willem and of course Rachel who was Beersphere guvnor ( I take so long to catch on) I got out just in time to catch the last train just in time for the early morning hangover. Face to face events are always fun - when you organise them - I started planning above and beyond meets back in (eek!) 2001 funded by Amazon book sales on the website and was always pathetically grateful to whoever came because the ratio of those coming is such a tiny ratio of those who give all the appearance of showing up and then don't. From those I met I could see the significant present of the digital planning fraternity - great to see how many of them there are now - a long ways from those heady days when you would run out of fingers when trying to figure out who was planning in online agencies. And to think I passed up the chance of joining Sysygy when it took up one room in 1997 :-)
Sorry I don't have pictures but sheesh the pub was in darkness and flash photography doesn't capture the flavour - too dim for mobile phones to take photos. great night - thanks beersphere - lets do it again soon.
