One of my favorite pieces of email, excerpted below, came from Tony Montoya of Tesseract (at http://www.tesseractec.com). Tony is the guy holding up the sign in Figure A. We made friends at Lotusphere and still keep in touch. He still teases me about making him "famous" in the February issue of DominoPower.

I wanted to thank you again for posting that picture of Rob & I on DominoPower. I guess you know by now that it made Lotus' main page, and on the day they released R5, no less! (That was *very* cool, and they've still not stopped kidding me about signing autographs around here.) --Tony

FIGURE A


Here's the famous photo of Tony Montoya with the wild and crazy water ride I AM sign. Roll over picture for a larger image.

I was curious as to why the photo was on Lotus' main page (aside from the fact that it was a very cool picture and that was probably reason enough) so I checked it out. Lotus' I AM ad campaign seems to have sparked something very primal in some people...an urge to run around with I AM signs and have their photos taken. Because of this, the official Lotus' I AM Photo Journal contest was born. On Lotus' News and Views page, there was a form, inviting people to submit their own I AM photos for judging.

Lotus' I AM Photo Journal contest is now over. Six sets of winners were published. You may still be able to visit the results if you poke around the Top Stories, Editor's Notebook section of Lotus' News and Views page at http://www.lotus.com/newsviews. However, because of my love for "unofficial reports" and my fascination about this particular primal urge, I felt moved to interview Jeremy Sacco, an editor working with the Web team at Lotus, and ask him for some of the photos that weren't displayed on the Lotus page.

Jeremy spoke of the fabulous response to the evocative R5 commercials, theorizing that it was partly because of the REM cover of the Clique's song "I Am Superman". He said that Lotus chose to hold the I AM Photo Journal promotion, not as a calculated marketing exercise, but for the "get involved" value, because it was a fun thing to do. They felt it would help build excitement around the R5 launch and reinforce a feeling of community. It certainly seemed to build community around the office at Lotus! People were always visiting Jeremy's office to see the new photos that were being submitted on a daily basis.