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Music

Early signs of “marketer douchebaggery”

It wasn’t five minutes after I stepped off the plane that I got a sense of what SXSW Interactive would be like this year.

At the bottom of the escalators of the arrivals terminal were five or six dunces dressed as chauffeurs, instead of holding signs of passenger names their message was some new web service.

So there it is: SXSWi 2011 would continue the emphasis on heavy, up-in-your-grill, non-stop marketing.

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Obviously this is obscene.

I wanted to take a photo for the purposes of this post, but then that would only encourage this sort of behaviour. I actually resisted even looking at the name of the site they were advertising.

That this company (again, I didn’t give it the dignity of a glance to get the name of it, though I think there were missing vowels) thought it wise to bombard people right as they step off the plane is really annoying.

I have nothing against marketing a product – I come here itching to discover new innovative stuff, and good marketers help me find it. But these guys represent something really unwelcome here.

One popular panel among the hardcore SXSWi attendees is Help Save SXSW from Marketer Douchebaggery, which happened on Friday.

Along with the Twitter hashtag #saveSXSW and the requisite Tumblr blog, these guys are trying to bring back a balance to things here, between being able to find new exciting stuff and getting hassled the moment you step off a long day of travel.

It of course can be argued this is all Twitter’s fault. In March 2007, under a year after it launched, the micro-messaging social network caused a swarm here. Thousands of so-called “influencers” took to Twitter, and effectively propelled it to the mainstream (it wasn’t really its own company at that point, having only launched in June, 2006).

But what these market strategies don’t get it is that The Twitter Effect often comes with a gentle push, but never, ever, ever with the shoving-it-down-your-throat approach.

Part of this is growing pains. Or, it could be just the sheer size. As one tweeter at the panel put it, “mass anything will cause douchebaggery.”

As much as I don’t think SXSWi is in any real danger, thus it doesn’t need to be “saved,” this flood of marketers hampers the success of the festival.

The aggressive thrust of products and services and apps and phones and software all showing up at once makes it difficult, if you’re a reporter, to find quality. Which is no big deal really. But if you’re a web start-up trying to get noticed down here, the mission becomes impossible.

There was a similar panel about marketer overload last year too, but evidently it didn’t reach anyone. At least not the company slumming around Austin’s airport.

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