Digital Evangelists Dine with David Pogue

Last Thursday, Eyeblaster threw an intimate dinner party for digital evangelists at Valbella in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, and they let me sneak in; David Pogue was the invited guest.
The night seemed to fall into three distinct parts:
1) Cocktails and passed hors d’oeuvres. I spent most of this time chatting with Pogue, one of my favorite writers; I’ve read his columns in the New York Times Circuits e-newsletter for years. He’s a gadget guru, though new to online advertising, so when we discussed the subject for a bit, it was fun being able to teach a few things to someone I’ve learned so much from. If you’re not sure who he is, here’s the clip you must see, if you haven’t watched it a hundred times already: iPhone: the Musical. Actually, if you have watched it a hundred times, it gets better on the two-hundredth viewing. I digress.
2) Dinner. The 15-20 of us there, including Eyeblaster’s international panoply of hosts, talked amongst ourselves over several courses of food and copious wine pourings. A highlight here: David Pogue taking a photo of the apple stuffed with mashed potatoes. You can see the thrilling video here:

And you can also see a rousing video of my souffle being served:

Yes, this is why the Flip was invented.
3) A call to arms. The end of it’s captured here, and I’m still trying to process all of it before I can write about it, but it was a great way for a bunch of smart folks in digital marketing to get together, discuss a lot of the main issues going on, and figure out the best ways to open up communications channels and build on this from here. I’ll be following up more on that soon.
You can see all the videos from the night on my makeshift YouTube channel. LonelyGirl it’s not.
Lastly, here are the attendees, which I’m copying from Liza Hausman’s blog since she put them all in one place:
Attendees: Amy Auerbach from PHD, Matt Enos from Tribal DDB, Amaya Garbayo from Mindshare, John Haake from Eyeblaster, Liza Hausman from Gigya, Alex Jorissen from Eyeblaster, Lindsey Kollross from MEC, Gefen Lamdan from Eyeblaster, John Morton from johnfmorton.com LLC, Linda Payson from Avenue A | Razorfish, David Pogue from The New York Times, Adam Romero from Agency.com, Adam Shlachter from MEC, Troels Smit from Eyeblaster, Doug Stivers from Beyond Interactive, Persia Tatar from Media Post, Ben Weisman from Eyeblaster and Digitas and Lucas Binder of UBS.