John Battelle: top marketer according to Ad Age

BB "band manager" and Searchblogger John Battelle was named one of the ten "Best Marketers in the Business" this week by Advertising Age magazine. John is also the founder of Federated Media, the firm that handles advertising for a slew of sites, including BB, Digg, MetaFilter, MAKE:, and 43Folders. Congrats, JBat! From the Ad Age profile (photo by Bart Nagel):

 Images Bin Image Photo Battelle100206"Talent management is not for sissies. You have to understand what it is to be an independent author making his living off of this. These are talented people living off fear and adrenaline."

This is John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, chronicler of Google and, most recently, a sort of Moses of the blogosphere, talking about what it's like to lead that scattered nation of aggregators and instigators into a promised land of advertiser respect and, of course, higher CPMs…

"You need to be the kind of organization who knows how to keep those people happy and talk them off of ledges," he said. "That is not for the weak of heart, and it's not what traditional media companies are good at."

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