XBiz Summer Forum ’07 in review

Whenever I go to any kind of convention, the rhythmic motions of my neck, like the waters of Solaris, conspire to turn my ID necklace around, so all anyone sees is the name of whatever company sponsored the costly lamination/lanyard process.

On a deeper level, it raises questions of who we really are. In the porn world, there have always been two camps.

I feel that, of the two adult trade publications, AVN is more defiantly pro-porn; freakier in its makeup, more accepting of the weird, and not self-conscious. There are people at AVN who would gladly go to jail so that porn could continue. But why shouldn’t they? I’ve been to some of their apartments, and I’ve been to many correctional facilities. California Institute for Men – Chino has better carpeting and televisions than those of AVN’s editorial staff.

But this week’s XBiz Summer Forum proved to me that one does not have to like porn to make money on it. In fact, having an emotional attachment to the material often clouds judgment when ordering and reordering one’s TGPs and linklists for optimized ROI.

Read a full account of the proceedings after a break in the HTML continuum.

It is very difficult not to compare AVN with XBiz, as XBiz is doing everything that AVN does, except -mostly- differently. There’s the Awards, the video magazine, the sponsorships, and now the conventions. The only thing XBiz has not yet tried its hand at is a trade show.

That XBiz has had its two Summer Forums at the Hard Rock Hotel is very classy. The place is big enough to hold the several hundred people who came and small enough to have character, whereas AVN’s January shindig at the Sands seems overwhelming at times.

But it was 112 degrees the other day, in the shady garage. Perhaps XBiz’ reluctant acceptance of the porn aesthetic (although one cannot get more porn than Joanne Cachapero) is reflected in its decision to hold its porn convention in Hell.

The Hard Rock’s comprehensive pool, estuary, and watering system was the focal point of the convention, with 33 tents arrayed around it, each rented by a different affiliate program, product, or studio (including Shane’s World, which turned its teepee into an igloo for humanitarian purposes).

Hustler’s new president, Michael Klein, was there, as were Adam & Eve’s Peter Reynolds and Mischa Allen, Oren Cohen of Tightfit, and Pink Visual’s Kim Kysar (all spoke at seminars). Private and Vivid were also represented.

At a seminar about generating free traffic for websites, I sat on a panel with Jay Quinlan of OCCash, traffic hub operator Harry Thomas, and Greenguy of Link-o-rama.

Quentin, known as XXXJay “on the boards”, pointed out that he might not like “Black Lesbian Strap-on” content personally but that it was up to webmasters to assess new trends in their purchasing of content for their affiliate programs.

What was interesting to me was that discussions of “content” left out words that weren’t part of meta tags. People talked about pictures rather than text, and I wondered if pictures without text was trulyy the wave of the future.

I felt the need to speak about the power of words to turgidify customers.

In a previous seminar on traffic, panelists had suggested to newbie webmasters that generating their own content was not recommended, “since there are so many other people out there who are already doing it,” and that recirculating other people’s work was the way to go. This seemed shocking to say and was shocking to hear, but the feeling passed; reducing sexuality to high-yield niches is at the center of what porn is about, so for panelists to suggest without irony that newcomers leave the originality to others should not have been surprising.

Other seminars included a well-intentioned but not very informative discussion of financial planning for pornographers and, in the minutes following the publication of the new 2257 proposal in the Federal Register, Free Speech Coalition lawyers dissected the text. Bottom line? If this passes, things will suck, with no distinction between primary and secondary producers and an adults-only warning on every page of porn websites, as opposed to the general warning people tend to use now.

With each event centrally located to the Hard Rock, people got to know each other over the course of the convention, mostly in the pool. Each of the lunches and most of the drinks were sponsored by some company or other.

Even the waitresses and booth girls were sponsored. I wondered at first why I did not recognize many of the people in XBiz tank tops and short shorts or the bikini’d ladies representing affiliate programs; it is because they were local or L.A. contracters for modeling/catering agencies.

I asked one woman who was walking around with a drink tray how the XBiz Forum measured up to other conventions she’d hostessed for.

“I was in a much skimpier outfit for an RV convention earlier this year,” she said, “and the people weren’t as nice.”

Unlike the AVN convention, actual porn girls were at a minimum, and there were no male porn performers there, unless you count Evan Seinfeld, who was there representing Teravision.

I talked with Seinfeld at length, but never saw Tera Patrick. “She’s up in the room,” he said, then showed me her picture on his iPhone (I counted 14 iPhones in all). I saw Seinfeld several times during the week, but never saw Tera. I began to doubt she was there. At the club Body English I was told that Jenna Jameson was in attendance but after several trips through the VIP area did not see her. I heard she looked good.

I spoke with Louisville’s own Tera Wray. I have not yet met someone from Kentucky who wasn’t charming. That is why I am a Kentucky Colonel.

Wray is the newly-signed contract star for New Jersey’s Pleasure Productions. I told her I didn’t know Pleasure Productions had contract stars.

“Well, they hadn’t met me yet,” she said sweetly.

I asked her if she went to the Kentucky Derby.

“I go every year,” she said. “This year I didn’t even have tickets, but I knew all the security guards.”

We held a moment of silence for Barbaro, but I refrained from pouring out my 40 on the ground in his memory.

I gave her my business card, but she had nowhere else to put it. Note to self: next year print business cards on watermelons.

I spoke with Brett Franklin of a gay site called Manaconda.

“You’re probably going to judge me,” he said, “but I want to go over there and suck that guy off.”

“I judge no one,” I said. “Just let him know beforehand.”

There were several well-sponsored and casual events around the pool, like open bars and an evening happy hour, and I expected the same breezy nature of a late-night club event on Wednesday.

I feel about clubs like Body English, what with its bottle service, bikini dancers, and PowerBook-wielding DJs, that they should go the way of MySpace. People tend to go through the motions at such events and I am unaware of anyone actually having a good time. Not like Disneyland. At the crowded Body English, which was located downstairs at the Hard Rock, I stood in various places, danced in various places, and spent most of the time yelling at people I like.

“THAT’S SOME CLEAVAGE,” I said to one person.

“NICE PANTS,” she replied. We would have said more but we were hoarse already.

I talked with Josh of Fleshlight, the Austin-based company that puts flashlights into cyberskin penis (now vagina) replicas.

“MY BOSS’ SON MADE THE FROGS FOR ‘MAGNOLIA’,” he said. “HE DESIGNED THE FLESHLIGHTS AFTER HE MADE HIS DAD A RUBBER VAGINA WHEN HIS MOM GOT PREGNANT AT 47.”

Apparently Fleshlight’s owner was indignant that he would not be able to have sex with his wife, the future mother of healthy twins, during her pregnancy, so he sought refuge in Science.

“SO THE FROGS IN ‘MAGNOLIA’ EMPLOYED THE SAME PENIS FLASHLIGHT TECHNOLOGY?” I asked.

“YES.”

“WERE THEY MADE AT THE SAME FACTORY?” I asked.

“YES.”

As I talked with Josh, both of us were casually spilling our drinks on one of the women in the booth. This is how crowded it was. I went from booth to booth, drinking vodka with little mixers, spilling little bits on myself and others, while others spilled their drinks on me. As you know, I am a bigger sybarite than most, but this was silly.

As I walked out, I approached a group of women, who looked at me frankly. They were not with the convention. I still had my ID lanyard on. One of the women grabbed it and looked at it, then shouted something to her friends.

“WHAT JUST HAPPENED BETWEEN US?” I asked.

“NICE NAME TAG,” she said.

My name tag, turned around, read “Pussycash”.

My two biggest regrets were that I did not actually stay at the Hard Rock, so an Internet connection was hard to come by, and that I hadn’t brought a bathing suit. I could as easily have jumped in a microwave to cool off.

For me the high point of the convention was to be a seminar delivered by XBiz staff on how to write press releases. As a person who reads press releases from porn companies every day, I am indeed blessed that I have a job where I can say whatever I like about them. Employees of trade publications have no such luxury.

So I was looking forward to how writer Anne Winter and the rest of the XBiz team were going to handle the words of current and future porn publicists, and I fully expected them to use examples from life, but they did not take the bait.

Instead, their version of a bad press release was written from scratch. I have to say it was better than some I’ve received. I asked XBiz publisher Tom Hymes why there weren’t any real-life examples.

“There’s so many that it would have been unfair to narrow it to just one,” he said.

“Plus {name withheld} would have tried to capitalize on it,” Winter said.

I suggested to XBizVideo editor Steve Javors that telling publicists how to write press releases for your own magazine was like telling your girlfriend how to give you a blowjob. It is self-preserving.

“That is apt,” he said.

I could not imagine AVN’s editorial staff delivering a lecture on how to write press releases. Not that they are not as plagued, if not more so, with bad press releases as XBiz, but their own bitterness and regret is augmented with a certain resignation.

It was also noteworthy to see that there was no coverage of the XBiz Forum on AVN whereas there has been plenty of advertising for AVN events like Internext and Erotica LA in the pages of XBiz. The only AVN employees I saw at XBiz were members of its sales team, probably keeping tabs on the tenuous affections of its advertisers.

This is unfortunate. Both of those media entities need the other, and officially pretending the other is not there is useless other than to look bad.

For an idea on how far there is to go, I will leave you with a quote from an XBiz story on its Forum.

“The show’s good. I always come to Vegas for the XBIZ show,” Python Cash’s Derrick Bronco said. “The basis for me is seeing people I already know and solidifying those relationships better.”

Next year’s Summer Forum should, in addition to being held no earlier than September 20, feature a seminar on how to give statements to press, if for no other reason than to solidify speaking better.

Previously: Products for your down under from down under
See also: XBiz Summer Forum