Hasta La Creative!

On the evening of Sunday, Oct. 14, Ad Age Editor Abbey Klaassen and I stood on a small, remote-controlled boat — one not much bigger than a queen-size bed — floating in the pool at the Tonga Room & Hurricane Bar at the historic Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Normally the boat is where the house band plays, but given that it’s the one spot that’s mic’d and sufficiently lit in the moodily dark room, we had no choice but to commandeer the vessel to present Ad Age’s annual Magazine A-List awards. The audience on the “shore” of the pool (or lagoon, as the Fairmont refers to it) consisted of attendees of AMC 2012, the annual Magazine Media Conference that draws publishers and editors from all the big magazine companies. Over the next two days, hundreds of magazine people, most of them having flown in from New York, would call the Fairmont home.

The optics, as they say, were a bit weird that first night. Here we were at the establishment hotel in town — a place where presidents and prime ministers have slept, where Tony Bennett debuted “I Left My Heart In San Francisco,” where the United Nations Charter was drafted — but in the basement of it. In a kitschy bar that in 2009 the hotel announced it planned to close (local preservationists cried foul, and so far, obviously, it hasn’t happened). And it’s worth noting that just before Abbey and I climbed aboard the rocking boat, a fake thunderstorm — signified by a too-loud-to-talk-over soundtrack of pouring rain and thunder — reverberated through the room for half a minute or so as fake lightning lit up the fake-lava walls and illuminated trays of hors d’oeuvres on tables housed in (of course) little thatched-roof huts.

Frozen in Amber

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