Hello World!
Today’s Inaugural post is brought to you by Maxfield’s House of Caffeine, located along the border of SF’s Mission and Castro district. In many ways, this is pretty appropriate, since I am starting this blog to address the cross-section of several insanely hot topics that are colliding in today’s Interweb-media-ad space. Yes, I’m talking about social media, online brand advertising, localized news, and mobile applications.
Yawn, you say? Why does the world need another blog about this? Do we really need a younger, cuter femme-ier, Guy Kawasaki-wanna-be, with no money, and a fistful of observations and opinions powered by caffeine, ego, and a bit of critical thinking skill? Do we really need another irreverent blog focused on commentary re: Deus ex Internets?
These are yawn worthy points! But you’ve stumbled upon this place somehow, and I promise this:
- entertaining entries.
- pick-up lines you can try out at your next start-up/hob-nobbing’free-drinkup mixer. I’ll put these in red, so you can walk away with something in a pinch. They’re not all good, but at least they’re 100% roadtested.
Today’s Mixer Pick-up Line: “Did I miss anything?“
Best used: when arriving late, while the representative for the drink-up sponsor is speaking to a roomful of people not really paying attention.
Target: a stranger in a fringe group of 2 or 3.
Pitfall: said-stranger is just there to get free drinks, and doesn’t work “in the industry.”
Escape technique: “I’m gonna get another drink.”
About Me, or “A Short History of What Motivates Me”
About a year ago, following the acquisition of TACODA by AOL, I joined the AOL Ad Sales Research team. Armed with a couple years of account management experience, a seemingly useless B.S. in engineering, and absolutely no talent for small-talk, I found myself thrown in front of the tsunami wavefront of the “online advertising industry.” *
I soon discovered that I’ve discovered the happy ending to my on-going quarter-life crisis, and somehow landed in my personal dream job; something that made good use of my left and right brain AT THE SAME TIME. Eat your heart out, interdisciplinary over-achievers!
So what do I do? Well, in my Twitter profile (and this is just as good of a time as any to name drop Twitter). I described myself thusly: “1-Woman Peanut Gallery; Data Sherpa; Geek Whisperer; Junior Miss Spin Doctor; Media Jargon Babelfish; Busker Patron; Reality Wrangler.“
While these are the roles I feel most comfortable in, and they all essentially boils down to one word: a translator. As far as my job title goes, I’m a market researcher, specifically researching the “online advertising” market. My job covers mostly three areas:
1. Tapping into syndicated sales research. This satisfied my daily requirement for nitty-gritty data on various target audiences. Some asked for by various RFP’s, other simply because I’m curious;
2. Developing vertical-specific ad success measurement solution, (i.e. having a counter argument ready when people tell me, “but I never click on an internet ad!”) This aspect of my job encourages me to stay abreast of analysis techniques and maintain a healthy addiction for new technical advancements;
3. And finally, my own specialty – synthesizing behavioral dissection/analysis (a.k.a “a girl, a lot of data, a brain – DOES IT BLEND?”) There’s an old fairy tale where this chic is asked to spin a siloh full of straw into gold thread, or she gets executed in the morning, yeah, it’s exactly like that. Except instead of translating one useless heap of material into a heap of commodity goods, I translate a mountain of data into digestible, “actionable” insights, often on a deadline.
The role of the translator is not new to me. Being bilingual, I’ve translated between Chinese and English for the past 20 years; Being an engineer student in a past life, I navigate comfortably between technical details and business value propositions; and at my job now, I often joke that I’m the go-between for modern day nerds (data geeks) and jocks (sales).
Someone’s gotta figure out how to monetize those smart ideas coming out of silicon valley, and it might as well be me.
And this is why this blog must be started.I hope you enjoy the entries.
Notes:
*At the time, it was simply known as “the twenty minutes I spend trying to explain to my parents what I do in exchange for health care and rent..”
