Wednesday, March 23, 2011

"How True Blood Sucks in Viewers" panel discussion at SXSW

It's interesting to learn that some popular True Blood " fan sites" are really owned by Media companies that run these kind of sites for many TV shows and not just True Blood !  Fascinating.... For what it's worth I am not running a media business nor do not run other fan sites.

On Friday, March 11th at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, TX, True Blood panel

You may recall a buzz back in 2008 when various bloggers began receiving mysterious dead language mailers and posting about them. These mailings served as the beginning of a marketing push for HBO’s True Blood, which premiered on the small screen later that summer. Representatives from some of the agencies involved in the campaign’s creation joined an HBO executive, a True Blood fan site co-owner to describe how it all happened during the SXSW panel, Fan to Fanatic: True Blood’s Marketing Hook on March 11, 2011.
Zach Enterlin, Senior Vice President of Programming for HBO, explained that the True Blood experience wouldn’t have been possible without the vision of Alan Ball, the show’s creator. Ball brought the show to HBO after the end of the hit Six Feet Under, and asked them how they could educate viewers about Bon Temps, Louisiana, as well as a world where vampires exist and live among us. Enterlin, a long time follower of Campfire’s work, brought this dilemma to them. Campfire jumped in with enthusiasm: Enterlin recalled that Brian Cain read all six books published at the time in the space of one weekend. Campfire wasn’t working alone. In fact, season one had ten agencies working on the campaign, and the HBO marketing machine was strongly backing the project. Enterlin credits the gusto all the vendors had for the work for how coherently so many different moving parts were able to move together. It just worked, he said, because everyone was on the same page together.


 You can listen to the panel now at SXSW’s site.
 Listen here 

Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris Chapter 3 exerpt at Penguin publishers

An Excerpt from Dead Reckoning


Chapter Three
I enjoyed driving to work for the evening shift when it was still light outside. I turned up the radio and sang “Crazy” right along with Gnarls Barkley. I could identify.
Jason passed me driving in the opposite direction, maybe on his way to his girlfriend’s house. Michele Schubert was still hanging in the relationship. Since Jason was finally growing up, she might make something permanent with him . . . if she wanted to. Michele’s strongest suit was that she wasn’t enthralled by Jason’s (apparently) powerful bedroom mojo. If she was mooning over him and jealous of his attention, she was keeping it perfectly concealed. My hat was off to her. I waved at my brother, and he smiled back. He looked happy and unconflicted. I envied that from the bottom of my heart. There were big plusses to the way Jason approached life.
The crowd at Merlotte’s was thin again. No surprise there; a firebombing is pretty bad publicity. What if Merlotte’s couldn’t survive? What if Vic’s Redneck Roadhouse kept stealing customers? People liked Merlotte’s because it was relatively quiet, because it was relaxed, because the food was good (if limited) and the drinks were generous. Sam had always been a popular guy until the wereanimals had made their own announcement. People who had handled the vampires with cautious acceptance seemed to regard twoeys as the straws that had broken the camel’s back, so to speak.

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