Our Cosmo hunk is, why, Dan Ilani

Dude

'This was like reaching back to my high school days and running for school government. You know, I did some heavy politicking.'

Our Cosmo hunk
is, why, Dan Ilani

Winner of magazine's Hottest Man in Media title

By Jamie L. Jones

    Under the tough professional skin that we media people wear, there lies a layer of irony, a chic self-consciousness about the occasional tacky stunts of our industry. Media just wouldn't be media without a little gimcrack.
    Accordingly, we all chuckled in June when Cosmo announced an industry-only contest called "Who is the Hottest Man in Media?"
    How very Cosmo at its self-promotional best.
    Media department contestants and colleagues were invited to visit the Cosmo web site to vote on the hunk of their choice.
    Vote early and vote often, they were told, as if to clear away any worries that this was to be a real election.
    The suspense mounted.
    Finally, last Tuesday evening, in the very last dog days of a seemingly endless media summer, a winner stepped forward to claim his title and prize: a portable DVD player.
    As it turns out, he is Dan Ilani from Mediacom NYC.
    "This is my 15 minutes," reports Ilani, his voice swelled with irony.
    Ilani's boss, Jen Porter, nominated him for the contest.
   "She was meeting with our Cosmo rep, and she calls me up and she's like, 'get in my office'," says Ilani.
    "I thought 'Oh, God,' so I grab my notebook, and grab my pen and go running into her office. Then the rep just jumps up and says 'smile' and snaps my pictures. That's about it."
    As Ilani and the people at Cosmo tell their war stories, however, it appears that a contest that was conceived as something of a goof quickly developed an energy all its own, with irony giving way to lots of very uncool competitiveness.
    "These people are nuts!" says Esther Laufer, associate publisher of the Cosmopolitan Group, about the contestants.
    "They are so competitive! They'd call their reps and say 'I got so many votes today, and I'm not even in the top 10; what's the deal?'"
     The contest web site featured thumbnail pictures of the contestants. Colleagues, friends and the contestants themselves could vote as many times as they wished.
     A feature that let visitors monitor the progress of the voting kept visitors coming back to the site.
    When a visitor clicked on a picture, a list of the top-10 contestants would pop up if the chosen contestant was on it.
    Ilani describes the sense of competition: "This was like reaching back to my high school days and running for school government," he says.
    "You know, I did some heavy politicking."
     Bribery? Under the table dealings?
     "I tried, but people are pretty honest," says deadpan Dan.
     "We just did a lot of voting. There were a lot of sprained wrists from the mouse."
     Ilani knew one other guy in the contest but didn't see him as real competition. He never made it into the top 10.
     When the contest was announced, Laufer anticipated that it would be more of a popularity contest than a beauty contest.
     Pictures of the contestants were only thumbnail-sized and generally of a poor quality.
     As in Ilani's case, sales reps snapped pictures of many of the contestants; others were cropped out of corporate group pictures.
    Ilani doesn't mind that he didn't win on looks alone.
    "People here at the agency felt like it was an agency contest. You had VPs sitting around and voting all day. People I didn't even know voted for me."
    The Media Men contest was not a quest for glory or celebrity for Ilani, neither a test of vanity nor an exercise for his sense of competition.
    He just really wanted the prize.
    "The motivation was this portable DVD player," says Ilani.
     "You can't give that up. It's like a paycheck."
     According to the interview with Dan on the contest web site, the first thing he'll watch on the portable DVD player is the movie "Dazed and Confused."
    "It's a classic," he says. "I still have one foot in college."
     Our strapping young winner graduated last year from Brandeis University in Boston. He grew up on Long Island. And he's a Leo.
     Ilani says he's "technically single," in that he's not married. But he has a girlfriend, whom he visits in London about once a month.
    "She begged me to write something about her, so that's why I said (in the Cosmo interview) that going to London is a hobby," says Ilani.
     Being the hottest man in media probably won't change Ilani's life.
     But he jokes that it might help his career. "You can't deny that it's that kind of industry," says Ilani.

-Jamie L. Jones is a staff writer for Media Life.

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