Schwag for me
OK. I’ve got a Ph.D., have been in the software business more or less for twenty years. I’ve seen a lot of things come and go. You’d think I’d be a bit blasé about IT stuff. But I’ve still got enough of a fifteen-year-old nerd in me to be immediately thrilled, delighted and ultimately hooked by the idea of Valleyschwag.
Valleyschwag, in a nutshell, is actually paying money for stuff you should get for free: someone’s advertising material. It’s what the brand-conscious teens all do. Why pay a normal amount of money for a normal sweatshirt when you can pay three times as much and be a walking billboard for the company?
Only — these are IT brands. The advertising is about IT stuff and IT related. And being hip IT geeks altogether, the Valleyschwag dudes (and, possibly, dudettes) even say they won’t include stuff from companies considered evil. Now isn’t that something!
I looked at the flickr albums of people unpacking and showcasing what they got in their first schwag “care package”. Stickers, flickr bages, a Technorati t-shirt (some folks even appear to have received an extra pair of oranges, and used them to inspire the biggest flickr comment storm I’ve ever seen). Now, the rational part of my brain said “big deal — they just paid fifteen bucks for company stickers and a t-shirt. Stuff you can pick up at a computer expo for free (or maybe in exchange for a business card — getting you not only the t-shirt, but also an endless supply of advertising junk mail adressed to someone who has almost exactly — but not exactly — the same name as you).”. Yes — sometimes I actually think the parentheses.
The fifteen-year-old geek inside me, who still thinks the ZX Spectrum was a neato system and the Z80 the best processor evah, quickly pounded the rational part of my brain into submission and started a barrage of “Oooooohhhh, I WANT that. Gimme gimme gimme GIMME…!”.
No points for guessing who won. And now the Valleyschwag guys have sent an email letting me know that they’ll ship my first package any day now. I can’t wait! I know it’ll take some time to get to good ol’ Germany. I just hope they air-mail it. And I hope it’s not wrapped in burlap. Who needs natural fibres anyway?
Tags: schwag;valleyschwag
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May 29th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
[…] Well - it seems that the next Valleyschwag packages (see my previous entry) are finally on their way. I’m not making any predictions as to when they’ll arrive, but knowing the German postal service and taking into account the fact that next Monday is a holiday, I’m not expecting anything to arrive before the middle of next week. […]