In really important news today, WOMMA’s Andy Sernovitz has, reportedly, called BzzAgent CEO Dave Balter a dick. Read all about it here. It seems Sernovitz is miffed by all the publicity BzzAgent gets but Balter says that is no fault of his. It’s just lazy journalists who hold BzzAgent up as the only practitioner in the space which, of course, is not true and Balter acknowledges that.. Ever since buzz marketing and word of mouth marketing started and back to the days of Justin Kirby (who seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet) there have been these in explicable tiffs among people in this space. I don’t know if it’s a young industry trying to define itself or the personalities of the people involved but I do know it’s dumb and unproductive.
Apparently, the statement was made by Sernovitz to BzzAgent’s PR rep “on the downlow” as Balter writes but it got back to him and now he’s blogged about it. I understand that in writing his recent MediaPost article, which was the straw that broke Sernovitz’s back, Balter is simply trying to clarify definitions within an industry forming on quick sand but did this really have to be blogged? Do I really have to write about it too? Is any of this positive to an industry that is trying to define itself to skeptics? Of course not. can we all grow up and get past this shit?
