The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Media

“Sweaty people who drink” who do “voodoo bullshit”

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I loved Kent Nichols’ (of Ask a Ninja) explanation of what we at FM — specifically our salespeople — do. Paraphrasing here, but the moderator asked how AAN has been successful courting brand advertisers. The secret, Kent said, is “sweaty people who drink” — aka hard work building real-life relationships with agencies and advertisers, sometimes with the lubricating influence of alcohol. It’s the non-engineerable aspect of advertising, he said, and it requires the sweat of people who do “voodoo bullshit” and “close deals.”

This panel has completely rocked — best of the SXSW interactive conference so far — and Kent Nichols is a great instigator. He totally gets it, and he expresses it in a laugh-out-loud hilarous way.

iTunes needs a Web interface

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Reading one of my colleague’s blogs today (FM is rife with bloggers, wouldn’t you know it?), I got interested in checking out a podcast he mentioned: a lecture by Michael Pollan, of The Omnivore’s Dilemma fame. But, that’s as far as I could get.

To actually listen to this podcast, I have to remember — when I get home, after a busy day at work — to fire up iTunes, search for this podcast, and subscribe. Yeah, that’ll happen. Not.

One thing I love about my TiVo service is that I can go to the Web interface (still not as good as the ReplayTV service was, but pretty decent), and subscribe to a season pass of a new show that I recently heard about. On Netflix, I can go over and queue up the newest, hottest independent film reviewed in the NYT, months before it’s actually released on DVD. On Amazon, I can impulsively start a TiVo download of a movie or TV show that I suddenly remember I’d like to see.

In all these case, my entertainment is basically sent to me, after a few keystrokes, and it’s ready for me to enjoy whenever I find the time. Why can’t I do this on iTunes? Am I missing something?

BlogHer — I’m Going

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Just squared away the last loose ends in my travel arrangements. I’m thrilled to be going to Chicago at the end of the month for the BlogHer Conference. In true mommyblogging fashion, I’m taking along my kid, who will be availing himself of the reasonably-priced childcare opportunities (bless the organizers for arranging this!). One of my objectives will be to meet up with any of our FM authors that will be in attendance, but I’m also just keeping the eyes and ears open to what’s going on in the blogosphere as a whole.

Anyway, all this to say that if you’ll be there, too, drop me a line!

Highlights from Web 2.0

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I got to visit my old conference-attending life today (without the responsibility of writing stories, thankfully), and am hanging out at the Web 2.0 Summit this afternoon. A few highlights…

* Google’s Marissa Mayer talking about the importance of speed, and nearly-instantaneous feedback.

* Digg’s Kevin Rose showing off an example of how the company is letting developers create innovative interfaces to the amazing amount of data that the site’s users are creating every minute.

* The teen/parent panel, masterfully moderated by Safa Rashtchy, in which ordinary people shared their personal experiences of the Internet. Surprises included how many of these folks are using Firefox. One was even using Opera. But, in other cases, I was surprised at the lack of sophistication. Only 2 had heard of, or used, Skype, for example. The kids spend an outrageous amount of time on MySpace (my teenage niece and nephew’s addiction is Bebo), but that’s not a huge surprise. But spending hours regularly updating your page, so the kids at school the next day will compliment you? Wow. (Like I should talk…. sitting here blogging.)

So, I’m hanging around this afternoon at the party FM is sponsoring. Hope to see folks I know there, including FM Authors. In contrast to other conferences I’ve been to, the attendance here still seems to be very strong, though it’s 5:20 p.m. on the last day of the show. Impressive.