Month: September 2008

Word of the day: borborygmus

Next time the person next to you in a meeting commits some loud stomach rumbling — you know that gurgling, growling noise that almost sounds like a fart, but because it’s internal it doesn’t carry the noxious impact and therefore is okay, but deserving of a comment anyway — say to them:

“Hey, nice borborygmus.”

That’s pronounced “bore-bore-rig-mus” and is pretty onomatopoetic to my ear.

Google Phone

This afternoon I played with a Google G1 (built with HTC), went right into search, ran my favorite term: “Churbuck”, pulled up my blog, scrolled with my finger.

I thought it was good.  Big phone, slider keyboard. It’s all about the OS and not being a phone app developer, I am not the person to opine on its strengths or weaknesses. But as a web phone. It worked for me and it was fast. I didn’t make a voice call.

And the crowd went wild ….

Finished my keynote at Folio in good health. Presented the Voices of the Summer Olympics, replete with Ogilvy Digital Influence produced-video(see embedded video a few posts prior to this), and it was well received.

Then onwards to NYC where I sit now, ready for a day of getting into it. Speaking gig number two at Advertising Week on Thursday. Me and Nicole Estebanell from Neo, Wenda Harris Millard, CEO of Martha Stewart Omnimedia and Jay Sears at ContextWeb. Topic: Online Media Fragmentation: Wandering Audience and What Advertisers can do about it. Then home.

Keynote @ Folio

i will take the stage in the ballroom of the Chicago Marriott in about two hours to talk — according to the show program — about “What e-centric marketers want from magazine brands.” Instead I entitled my slides, “Geek Marketing” and open with Steve Rubel @ Edelman’s year-old definition of geek marketers as those people who straddle the worlds of marketing and technology and drive the two together into interesting and effective stuff. As usual I feel unprepared and ready to crash and burn. I don’t do well in ballroom environments, with microphones and podiums. I greatly prefer to sit on the edge of the stage, tell stories, and take questions. Standing up there for 75 minutes with a powerpoint is my idea of hell.

Folio is one of the biggest shows for the magazine industry. As a trade magazine it was best known to me as a journalist for its annual salary surveys which allowed me benchmark my compensation against other reporters and editors. This one is pretty packed, and fortunately, what what I have seen and heard, not mired in Print vs. Online 101 discussions, in fact, Time’s president and publisher, Ed McCarrick just delivered a morning keynote about the reinvention of Time as a digital property, not

At dinner last night with yesterday’s keynote speaker, Revision 3 CEO Jim Louderback (and fellow PC Week alumnus), we joked about the doom and gloom scenarios that would so easy and so glibly delivered: “run for your lives! Print is dead.” But the reality is there is hope for magazine brands in this day and age, the question is whether or not a spirit of innovation has taken hold so the magazines can start to drive the evolution of media and not react to it.

My agenda today is pretty basic:

  1. What it is like to leave media for marketing?
  2. What does an ecommerce focused advertiser look for from media?
  3. The difference between demand generation and brand awareness online
  4. The Funnel
  5. The marketing dollar
  6. Brand is reputation and word of mouth
  7. The death of the microsite model
  8. The rise of the social model
  9. Our latest and most ambitious online campaign (Voices of the Summer Olympics)
  10. Some advice

I’ll try to post my slides later. Until them, wish me luck and no, don’t tell me to imagine the audience in their underwear.

P-town beach walk

The last weekend of the summer and Daphne suggested we stop thinking about afternoon naps and get up and do something cool, so off we went to the end of the Cape – Provincetown – for a walk on the beach, a stroll through the town, and a dinner at the Lobster Pot.

It is as far a drive to P-town as it is to Boston, so I stopped at Race Point, the apex of the Cape’s pugnacious curled fist of sand, to stop and stretch my arthritic knees. We walked down the beach, past the Lifesaving Museum, to the village of beach buggies gathered for the start of the Fall striped bass run.

The fishermen were waiting for the tide to change and cleaning some fish to the delight of the seagulls. I’ve always wanted to do this some fall, and intend to do a less extreme, and more solitary version of this lifestyle early in October when I take a week off.

We strolled for half an hour before our stomachs got the better of us and we had to drive into town for a seafood dinner at the Lobster Pot. I have to once again lament the state of New England Clam Chowder as the Lobster Pot’s won “Best of Cape Cod” something like ten years in a row thanks to an award bestowed on them by the execrable interior design magazine Cape Cod Life. This was, in this chowder reviewer’s opinion, an award winner only in terms of presenting, in a bowl, the archetype for that species of clam chowder known as the “wallpaper paste” model of thickened milk, potatoes, and suspect clams that dominates every menu in the world thanks to the corrupting influences of Snow’s canned goo.

The Cape Cod amber ale was good.

Walking around with a camera in a place as scenic as Provincetown makes a cynic like me instantly suspicious of every photo “op” as being a tourist motif that has been photographed to death by a bazillion Instamatics before me. Whatever, I had a good time, and am thankful I have stuff like this to snap pictures of in my very backyard when people come thousands of miles to see it themselves once in their lives.

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