Red carpets, vice presidents and first quarter ad totals -- Masha Geller recounts the week in interactive.

What a festive week! Maybe it’s because I decided to skip the OMMA conference and stay in New York while everyone else went West; maybe it’s because the IAB finally put out a release I can’t pick on, or maybe it’s just the weather or the star alignment, but your resident skeptic has only good things to report.

For starters, according to the IAB’s latest release, internet advertising totaled more than $2.8 billion for the first quarter of 2005, making this the highest reported quarter in nine consecutive growth quarters. According to the data, Q1 2005 revenues represent a 26 percent increase over Q1 2004 ($2.2 billion) and a 4.3 percent increase over Q4 2004 ($2.7 billion.)

Not bad for the first quarter of the year, which usually brings a slight post-holiday downturn.

It’s no wonder the ad industry spent the week celebrating its achievements, kicking things off with the Webby Awards on Monday night at New York’s Gotham Hall. A bit of trivia before I get to the winners: The Webby Awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences (yes, there is such an organization) and are the self-proclaimed Online Oscars (no, winners don’t “thank the academy”).

This year, for the first time in their nine-year history, the awards were held in New York, and have toned down quite a bit from the red-carpet black-tie/weird San Francisco costume days of the end of the last millennium. There is still a strictly enforced five-word limit on acceptance speeches, which makes for some laughs between dinner courses. This year, the awards received a record number of entries from all 50 states and more than 40 countries and added a Special Achievement category for the likes of Al Gore, who, as I mentioned in recent columns, received the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in “recognition of the pivotal role he has played in the development of the internet over the past three decades.”

In keeping with my luck at awards shows, I was seated next to a gem of a lady with a French Canadian accent who claimed she’d been involved with the internet for 27 years and was instrumental in the creation of the World Wide Web. In the course of fairly benign dinner conversation that spanned a number of issues ranging from my age to German mathematicians of the twentieth century, I discovered that this woman, who is an editor of a web publication, according to her card, stopped using ICQ because they were watching her conversations, “wouldn’t trust Bill Gates with anything,” and really didn’t know the difference between adware, spyware or cookies.

Since I was hoping to get a sense of what the web world is really like outside online advertising, that was strike one. Strike two was my brief chat with Al Gore, who gallantly rose to shake my hand under the watchful eye of his security detail, but in keeping with the Webby five-word tradition offered the following in response to my inquiry about whether he thought he deserved the Lifetime Achievement Award: “I’m not giving any interviews.”

His official acceptance speech was better: “Please don’t recount this vote.”

In all fairness, the former Vice President was indeed instrumental in pushing through some very important legislation that helped the internet’s proliferation in our lives. Other deserving Webby Special Achievement recipients included Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist, for Webby Person of the Year; The Kleptones, a British band pioneering new musical genres and methods of online distribution, for Webby Artist of the Year; and Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, the founders of Flickr, for Webby Breakout of the Year.

The Webbies weren’t the only show in town this week.

In the greater ad world, TBWA\Chiat\Day was awarded the Grand EFFIE for its work with Apple at the 2005 EFFIE awards gala hosted by the New York American Marketing Association on Tuesday. It was the eleventh time the agency has won the Grand EFFIE and the fifth time in the last seven years. The agency was also awarded a total of three Gold EFFIEs for Apple and Nissan, two Silver EFFIEs for Infiniti and adidas and one Bronze EFFIE for its work on Nextel.

BBDO also had a good week, winning four Gold EFFIEs for campaigns created on behalf of Campbell's Soup ("Campbell's Instead"), GE ("Imagination at Work"), Pepsi Vanilla ("The Not- So-Vanilla Vanilla") and the Peace Corps ("Life Is Calling. How Far Will You Go?"). In all, BBDO captured a total of eight EFFIEs.

BBDO was also named "Agency of the Year" at the 2005 International Food and Beverage Awards (FAB) in London, the only global competition dedicated exclusively to honoring advertising in the Food and Drinks categories. Earlier this year, BtoB magazine named BBDO New York the best large-size b-to-b shop. BBDO is part of Omnicom Group, Inc.

And that just about does it for awards. On a more practical plane, following my Webby experience I was happy to find out that more than 300 people have signed on to support the Safecount.org initiative, which was born out of the cookie deletion saga to find long-term methods of measurement that are safe for consumers and advertisers. The group also formed an Advisory Board that will help determine strategy and tactics.

The latest in the cookie saga, as you know, is the US House of Representatives passed two separate bills addressing Spyware: HR 29 (Barton) and the HR 744 (Goodlatte) and sent them to the Senate to decide which one it prefers. As I’ve said previously, I’m not holding my breath for legislation to offer much help, which is why I’m thrilled to report that makers of anti-spyware software have joined together in an effort to discuss standards and implementation of policies, specifically how to differentiate spyware from adware. The group is in the early stages of development with involvement from CDT (the Center for Democracy and Technology). Their goal is to have some recommendations posted this summer.

iMedia editor-at-large Masha Geller is the founder of interactive marketing and corporate communications consultancy Geller Public Relations in New York. She has been covering the interactive advertising industry since 1999 as the former editor-in-chief of MediaPost.com, and is a widely-published thought leader in the interactive arena.