• by John Capone , September 18, 2009

Simon Waterfall, one of the cofounders of the agency Poke, has stepped down from the company he helped start. Waterfall was recently named among the honorees who will be celebrated at this year's MediaPost Online All Stars event, where he says he may now be hard-pressed to keep his remarks short. The distinction is the latest in a very long list of honors that Waterfall has received.

"It's difficult leaving your best mates," Waterfall told MediaPost, "But I need to step up and start to challenge myself." Waterfall has accomplished much over his career, which began in the very earliest days of digital when advertising with the blocky pixels Waterfall programmed at the age of 16 for Commodore 64 games was little more than an idea.

After an education in industrial design, Waterfall went on to found Deepend, an agency that emerged from the nascent field of online advertising in the late 1990s, which nearly weathered the dot-com crash, but did not. From out of the ashes of the bubble-burst Waterfall and Iain Tait, Nicolas Roope, Peter Beech, Nick Farnhill and Tom Hostler founded Poke, hoping to challenge the ideas of what an agency could be. In addition to being creative director for Poke Waterfall pursues other endeavors, such as a fashion line he designs with Matt Grey called Social Suicide.

Poke will wind down his day-to-day duties for specific accounts over the next few months. "Poke will always be an amazing place to challenge yourself. It's a company that at its heart, has an internal desire to 'make it better,' think in new ways and push every brief and expectation," he says. "I cherish this spirit and feel now is the time for me personally to challenge myself again, use some of my different skills from the range of creative disciplines and make myself sweat a bit. I don't know what or where, but I know I have the energy to carry on Poke's attitude to different arenas."