• by Gaetano Pollice , December 2, 2008

Tim Hanlon on breaded chicken, blog feeds and ballads

Tim Hanlon joined the leadership team of Publicis Groupe's VivaKi Ventures in October, where he oversees the unit's investment activity, with a particular focus on new-media game changers. Besides Hanlon's more than 15 years of industry experience, most recently as executive vice president of Denuo, he's also a self-professed guru of '70s and '80s pop music trivia ("Give me a few bars of a song, and I'm probably going to know it," he boasts.)

In keeping with Media's picks of media people to have lunch with, Hanlon, 43, has some favorites of his own, including Rupert Murdoch, Barack Obama, Howard Stern and ... Floyd Vivino, star of the 1970s New Jersey TV variety program, The Uncle Floyd Show. "Uncle Floyd knows television past and present," Hanlon explains. "The guy's probably got a lot of stories about the good old days of TV."

What's your choice restaurant for a business lunch in Chicago?
RJ Grunts. It's very '70s kitsch, and where the first salad bar was created.

What would you recommend on the menu?
You've got to get one of their vanilla milkshakes and partake of their salad bar. Their breaded chicken is breaded in Kellogg's Corn Flakes. You wouldn't want to have chicken any other way.

Like Don Draper on Mad Men, would you partake of an alcoholic beverage during a business lunch?
All the fun came out of the ad industry around the time I joined it. A milkshake is about as wild and wacky as I'm going to get.

How do you typically start your day?
Checking my Bloglines RSS feeds. Information is the key to survival in the media today. If you don't know what's going on, you're toast.

What are your favorite Web sites?
For music, thehypemachine.com. For sheer sports obsessive compulsiveness, Uni Watch, which is about sports uniforms. Paidcontent.org is a must-read in our world, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

And MediaPost, of course - you forgot MediaPost. If you weren't working in media, what would you do instead?
I want to host an overnight talk show, heavy on interviews and personalities. I'm fascinated by people in the public eye and what makes them passionate. It would be like Larry King when he was on the radio, but with a modern sensibility.