Qualifying as an advertising photographer back in 1967 and then continuing training in parallel with his employment in top Manchester studios, a skillset including advertising photography, design, writing and movie production soon led to Ian Bennett becoming known in professional circles as The Mediaman.
Over time, Ian built up an enviable reputation for technically accomplished stills displaying design flair and imaginative lighting which he carried over into further assignments in the world of movie production and magazine features. Although the GulfMediaMan domain was first registered around the beginning of the 2000's it can actually be traced back to the 1990's when Ian was approached to head up the photo unit of Saudi Arabia's state owned oil company, Saudi Aramco. Based in Dhahran on the Arabian Gulf, MediaMan soon became GulfMediaMan.
ACE Corporate Editions was originally set up to support Ian's freelance writing, PR and event organisation activities. Since retirement, Ian has not undertaken any for-profit commercial assignments and the ACE web site has now been discontinued.
With no commercial assignments being undertaken, in retirement GulfMediaMan is restricted to web design for ACE, GMM, OMF and other NFP projects along with design and special digital effects for OMF movie projects - all on a not-for-profit basis.
Old Man Film released its first feature movie in 2014 and more than 24 films to date. Many have won international awards while two features and a documentary are still running on Amazon Prime channel. Current projects are Ssounds music videos.
Domain names are never fully owned for once they have been registered the registration has to be renewed on a regular basis which isn't usually a problem. Renewed annually for several years, gulfmediaman.com was registered through a registrar in America and everything was fine. However, an owner can renew a domain through any domain registrar and on responding to a later renewal notice it only became clear after renewal that the renewal notice at that time had actually originated from a registrar in Germany.
That registrar (aptly named Joker), effectively stole the domain and several troubled years ensued with various elements of the domain often not working. Joker also 'locked' the domain to themselves and although attempts to retrieve the domain were made, Joker never provided correct transfer codes to enable us to retrieve our domain.
Eventually we planned that at the next renewal we would allow the domain to expire. Then once the domain was again available (which normally takes around five or six weeks), we would re-register it ourselves with a reliable registrar in the UK. In the meantime we would register a temporary dot co dot uk version to cover the downtime.
Eventually we planned that at the next renewal we would allow the domain to expire. Then once the domain was again available (which normally takes around five or six weeks), we would re-register it ourselves with a reliable registrar in the UK. In the meantime we would register a temporary dot co dot uk version to cover the downtime.
But Joker were a step ahead and as soon as they realised that our domain was not being renewed, unbelievably they sold it to an associate in Canada. The domain then bounced around several 'owners' and over the next few years the domain was offered to us many times if we paid several thousands of pounds to buy back our own domain! Behind the scenes we made regular whois checks and eventually these showed that none of those exorbitant attempted sales of the domain that had been stolen from us had been successful and that gulfmediaman.com was again available at only the registrant cost. So more than two decades after it had been stolen, in April 2023, we again owned the domain.
