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A Look At Free Reviewer Swag
chicl3t writes "It used to be that the lagniappes that came along with hardware for review were things like USB drives — makes sense, one 128MB drive for a 100MB presentation. But...iPod nanos? As in more than one? That's another story entirely. It's damn nice swag, of course, but at what point is it too much? A DailyTech writer talks about his experiences with swag."
As I write this on my beautiful Apple MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo Santa Rosa 2.4ghz with an ultrafast 4 GB of Corsair Memory and my always trustworthy Western Digital MyBook Pro 1TB World Edition backup. This marketing madness must stop.
Does anyone actually bother reading those reviews? I sure don't. They usually tend to say nothing but positives about the products being reviewed, especially when the reviewer got them from the manufacturer free-of-charge. Of course, that's to be expected, since they want to get more such free products (which I don't doubt they use for themselves afterwards, until they fall apart a week or so later).
The only reputable source I've found for reviews is Consumer Reports. Other than that, the pickings are slim.
That's it! Tomorrow I'm talking to the editor of the magazine I work for (a music magazine) about starting a tech section.
Lavish swag (swag by definition is lavish, eh?) is far from new - and far from news, making this topic a non-starter. And on the weekend when Leopard has been turned loose - tsk, tsk.
And how 'bout those Rockies??!! Are they choke central, or what?
That's only a $150 device. $79 refurbished. Do they load it up with ads?
First I hear of the terms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagniappe and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swag.
On another note, isn't this comparable to the free gifts that pharmacutical companies give doctors on their conferences. It is just that this doesn't have the obvious connection to peoples health and well being and perhaps is a bit smaller in scope. A bit far fetched perhaps but the same principle or what?
And some Slashdot militants complain that critical thinking isn't taught in the US school system (or White House press conferences)!
This is a fine example of critical thinking being rewarded. In their heart of hearts, Corporations only want people to understand the benefits of their products. And writers... well we all know how hard it is to grind out paragraphs for which someone wants to pay. If writers have to EBay their lagniappes for food and rent money, are you going to oppress them with your sanctimonious principles, you cruel prescriptive bastards?
Besides, the reviewers are not receiving bribes. They are lagniappes. If I were a politician, I would be open to receiving lagniappes. It sounds like something you get at a fine soirée, like canapés and other words with French accents in them.
Message texted from pew #7 in my church using a Blackberry from a review I did earlier this year.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Please email me for my latest free service "Swag Removal". I will provide you with an address that you can ship all of your unwanted swag valued at over $20. I will then make sure that swag is "properly handled" to provide you with an ethical solution to the problem at no cost to you other than shipping.
...apparently I am in the wrong line of work.
-F
"Lagniappes" is a word I've not come across before. For anyone else who couldn't figure out the meaning via context, or who's looking for a proper definition:
lagniappe (lan yap)
noun
something given as a bonus or extra gift.
ORIGIN Louisiana French, from Spanish la ñapa.
Ack!
At another convention, I got a guitar tuner, and a really nice long sleeve Moog Synthesizer T shirt. ANY old dump can crank out cheap short sleeve shirts - you know you're getting a better deal when they dish out heavier quality long sleeve T shirts. That's much better swag. I am a swag seeker. I have original Napster Golf Shirts. I have Macromedia mouse pads, I have all kinds of this crap in my garage. I even have a heavy duty cotton button down collared Fontographer shirt. Really nice shirt, and a prized possession. I have a long sleeve "ready Set go" shirt, too.
But iPod nano? BWAHAHAHAAAAA!!! Don't make me laugh. That it such junior league material - intro stuff like my shirts and mousepads. When they give away the giant 160 gig iPod, then we're talkin' quality swag....
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Its easy to overlook the odd thumbdrive. It's not so easy to overlook an iPod Nano ... or two. At my old company, AnandTech, anything that cost more than the price of shipping went back to the vendor, including the unsolicited stuff.
Sounds like somebody's pissed that they didn't get their share of the pie.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
> It's damn nice swag, of course, but at what point is it too much? A DailyTech writer
> talks about his experiences with swag.
If you are a reviewer nothing is too much. If you are a consumer anything at all is a bribe.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm a reviewer for a UK-based PC magazine, and I have to say, though companies do tend to give out freebies at press events, I've never been given anything remotely as interesting as an iPod. Normally it's a USB thumb-drive and a branded pen or two. For major launches you might get a rucksack.
But be that as it may, surely giving out gifts of any size is only a problem if it actually influences reviewers. And on that count I see no grounds for concern at all. I think anyone who works in this industry quickly develops a healthily cynical regard for manufacturers, and if we feel like a company's being unusually nice to us our immediate instinct is to wonder why, and to look at their product with extra suspicion. The magazine market's just too competitive for reviewers to get away with endorsing lousy products: readers aren't stupid, and I think most of us love our jobs far too much to sell out our reputations for a few hundred pounds' worth of free stuff.
(That's how it seems to be with print journalism, anyway. Web reviewers... well, I can't speak for them.)
Almost all review swag I used to keep, from vapourware under NDA to released products. Products such s motherboards, cases, CPU's, video cards, RAM etc I would just keep for later reviews, or make to some good use.
I remember NVIDIA sending five GeForce 4 cards when they were vapourware to the public so we could overclock them to smithereens. Of which, two died and the other two made up machines from other review equipment that was kept.
Isn't the nano just a pen drive with bells on?
Dear Nvidia,
Dude, can i rite yur reveiws for free iPods!? My mom says I can rite real good and I gots lots of opinyuns about thingz! I would put the reveiw on myspace and facebook and all my friends would reed it! Nvidia, wen do i start?!?!!!!!!111111oneone
Luv,
Timmy
3rd grade
Doesn't the value of the freebies awarded to the reviewer depend directly upon the number of stars awarded by the reviewer?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Aren't those the older-style iPod nanos with the small screens? I bet AMD got a hell of a deal on them.
The Perils of Swag and what it says about the one accepting it.
[End Of Line]
Maybe it is just me, but I don't see nearly as much swag as there used to be. Even when I went to CeBit many years ago, unless you were one of the first ten people at a booth, or were a serious buyer, there was very little swag beyond maybe a key ring or something similar.
I do some consulting for a very large company around a product that has a base price in the six figures. A couple guys at the customer site asked if I could get some t-shirts for them. I practically started a maize of red tape just *asking* if I could get some swag for these guys, despite the kind of cash they had already put on the table.
Maybe executive types, or journalist reviewers like the guys in the article get swag, but the days of free-flowing t-shirts and goodies seem to be a thing of the past from my experiences.
I wonder if the
It appears from the comments that most folks don't use dictionary.com as their first reference point for words that they don't know, and use either Google or wikipedia. Interesting.
--
$tar -xvf
Yes, manufacturers are going to try to give journalists gifts and maybe this is to try to sway what they write. Whilst I'd have thought very few journalists would be influenced directly, maybe when you're thinking of the no-name builder of the next nVidia gpu you're going to review, your mind might more quickly leap to the one that's written on the flashdrive in your pocket - and you may give their PR a call first.
Bit thaqt annoyed me about the article was the notion that journalists are paid enough, without having to resort to accepting and flogging gifts. Now that 'paid enough' is their salary and where does their salary come from? Well it comes from those banner ads surrounding their article. If you want to follow the money, then more money comes in from entirely ad-driven revenue to the site, over the value of a few free gifts. When I saw that article, I was being told to buy OCZ and Crucial memory. Whilst those ads are there, I can't be alone in thinking there's a possibility they might look on those manufacturers more 'leniently'
Journalists They would seem to rate a product based upon the giveaways. If the product supplier didn't like the review they got then threaten to not to advertise.
5/5 amazing
I use google to get to dictionary.com or the Urban Dictionary (depending on the word). I have dictionary.com in my dropdown search box, but usually it's faster to get there by clicking on the google hit, as opposed to selecting the dictionary.com box and then clicking. This is all in Firefox; not sure what you can do in IE. The new version of IE probably has tricks of its own.
That is the only real way to seriously review a product. Buy a real version of it from a real retailer who had no idea who you are. That is how consumer watchdogs do it, they want to avoid any potential that the producer tries to influence the results.
We all seen the stories about reviewers being send special versions, geared to do really well in the used benchmarks.
Do it like the pros do it. Seperate yourselve completly from the people whose product you are reviewing.
Offcourse, that means the public has to start A paying the reviewers B wait till the product has already been released before the review can be done. Not going to happen, I am afraid.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"such as marking down a sports car for it's rough ride when that's a sacrifice that needs to be made in order to get better performance."
Tell me the car and I'll look it up.
I've never seen such a thing.
The idea is game sales correlate directly to game reviews. It's in the companies best interests to bribe the hell out of the reviewers. The best example of this was with the PC Gamer review of Doom 3. They got a lot of negative feedback from their review of the game, so they felt it necessary in the next issue to print an article defending why they gave Doom 3 such a great review. They said things like 'People expect games these days to be able to cure cancer while riding a unicycle wearing high heels and juggling'. So that's their justification for giving Doom 3 a good review? Because people expect too much out of games? I think it had largely to do with the sales of Doom 3 and the numerous full page ads id software took out in the magazine. In my opinion games journalism is probably the most dishonest and cooked form of journalism there is. Mind you, taking shameless bribes goes with a lot of other reviewing jobs.
I have nothing compelling to say
Is my Matlab brand Rubik's cube, with different pictures on each site. I can't even bloody solve it without The Internet to help. I don't keep it at work any more in case of more coworkers picking it up going "that's clever".
The Simulink control graph is cute though.
I think that's a bigger form of swag - actual money, disguised as an indirect business deal.
I'll bet the people in charge of certain magazines or blogs have enormous incentive to put the products of their sponsor companies in a positive light - or at least in a non-negative light.
At the same time you have to wonder if they'll spin the product of a competitor to their sponsor's product in a negative light.
For instance, I remember back in the day, Microsoft products would get reviewed much more favourably than WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 or any other competitor based on subjective criteria such as "ease-of-use". Of course, Microsoft was the heaviest advertiser in magazines such as PC Magazine, and you wonder if their executives talked and made an agreement of money for good reviews.
At CNet, many of their reviewers have written books about Microsoft products, gathering information from people close to Microsoft - how they can maintain an unbiased opinion on any review with a Microsoft gadget is beyond me.
There are many blogs where the PS3 gets bashed over anything, from calling it a George Foreman grill, to bashing Sony's "evilness", to it's lack of backwards compatibility to it's price. However, the XBox 360, a product by Microsoft, doesn't get bashed nearly as much over it's failure rate, Microsoft's "evilness", overcharging for non-standard components and online play, it's non-backwards compatibility, and so on... - not surprisingly, Microsoft does a lot more advertising on these sites than Sony.
My point is, bribes go much further in the tech review/news industry than swag...
Books and toys of all sorts just for giving a junk e-mail address... and telling someone that you'll "really consider" adopting a $125 textbook for a design course when you really don't use any textbook aside from freebie guides available on the internet and articles available through university library subscriptions.
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Read the HardOCP review of the iBUYPOWER P4 Custom Build. If there is a HardOCP review for something, I trust it more than any other review. They aren't afraid to rate something terribly, and to tell you everything that is wrong with it. They also go through the buying process and refuse any free stuff they are offered.
Insert self-referential sig here.
You should be amaized.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I remember a compiler comparison in Info world. The text of the review did not match the score card. I spoke with the author and found out that the scorecard he submitted was different from what was published. The scores apparently were based on the amount of advertising purchased by the compiler vendor. While doing some writing for the DPMA and BCS, I got a little swag (along the lines of free software). I did attend a few presentations with nice meals for the press.
It didn't effect my reviews or commentary. I still slammed the companies I got freebies from.
Fight Spammers!
Not so much. There's a local telecom company that formerly gave out Nano's to hear their 'pitch' for your phone services.
This year, they're giving out PSPs.
I originally thought this was ridiculous, before I booked my $1000 flight, $100 hotel, and rented a $100 car to go to a pointless 3 hour meeting at one of MY customers.
-Styopa
It appears in Shelby Foote's Civil War history (in the second volume -- it's much easier to find in The Beleaguered City in Ch 1), and seems to be a Mississippi/Louisiana dialect word. I can't find it -- there are a LOT of words to skim through! -- immediately, but it's there someplace.
It's bad enough that these guys are buying politicians in Washington D.C. (any company big enough to, does.) but hardware reviews!? Those are sacred! How are we supposed to know whether to be AMD or Intel fanboys? ATI or Nvidia? Without accurate information, there's no way for fanboys to make fun of the other fanboys! (ok, there is, but let's not go there!) What's the world coming to when nerds betray nerds for corporate swag?
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
P.S. If you have a chance to vacation in Mexico, take a trip to a pharmacy and you can not only get hella cheap QVAR (and other inhaled steroids) but you can also get the old albuterol MDIs: Mmmmmmm chlorofluorocarbons.