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brilliant co-marketing
Photo courtesy your correspondent

This is a promotion that Piercing Pagoda ran in September 2011. You could get a low-end Android smartphone free* from them if you submit to any of the piercings they offer. The only *wrinkle was the $50 data plan and new two year contract that was required to get the phone. A mere formality.

This seemed brilliant to me a year ago. Take people who turn up at your business seeking elective pain and you've got a data plan audience ready made. People looking for what might be permanent body alteration might not sweat a commitment of only two years.

A year later it seems more desperate than brilliant. I now think it was just a delaying action to lock up some otherwise loose subscribers for two years before the iPhone 4S appeared.

Cell phones and earrings may have been co-marketed last fall but the moment is fast approaching when they will be just be the same thing marketed at the low end by Claire's Boutique and remaindered at dollar stores.

I thought back to this picture after reading a terrible 'laptop bag' review over on Gizmodo last week. When I read:

"You spent hundreds of dollars on your laptop ... . At Gizmodo, we're married to our laptops. They are our livelihood." --Gizmodo

I was confused. I didn't understand why they were sandbagging the piece from the start by reminding readers that laptops can now be only a bit more expensive than the bags under review. Gizmodo is right about the price most consumers pay. Most laptops are now actually quite cheap. Best Buy's value laptop today is a 15.6" Toshiba for $279. That machine is no miserable netbook! It's an entire miserable laptop with a full size numeric keypad.

Gizmodo editor Leslie Horn reviews nearly five bags in a 'Battlemodo' no-holds-barred product shootout. The entire review process took about a week. That's as long as some Apollo missions! Each bag surely endured a brutal schlepping. The full test regime required each bag to fit "a 15-inch MacBook Pro, a charger, a notebook, keys, wallet, sunglasses, iPhone, and in most cases a couple of extra gadgets ...".

Contestants three and four wiped out early in the review. Editors over at the Giz failed to preflight half of the bags to see if they could actually hold these items. The worst offender was probably the electric blue laptop sleeve that is -- just a laptop sleeve. You could have disqualified it at 10 yards. Up next was the Clare Rojas Tote Bag for 13" MacBook Pro. The included padded sleeve for a 13" MacBook Pro probably won't work well with a standard testing machine that measures two inches larger diagonally. 0 Stars? Death? No. 3 Stars! It's wonderfully whimsical, unique, and adorable.

Contestant two was a credible messenger-style laptop bag from an expensive label. Horn sets it up well and balances the readers right where she wants us with "if you have a considerable amount of cash for a laptop bag, it's worth it.". The trap is set!

Blam! In comes the winner. It's Jansport's messenger bag! "$50 is an unbelievable deal for such a fantastic bag.". I wept. Four bags to make the piece seem worth reading. Two throwaways reserve the spotlight for the winner and an artificially expensive alternative to bring us home.  If I set up pieces like this on the Jansport account, I would insist that the reviews were handled by senior editors like Horn and not mere hangers-on and, uh, bag holders.

You can be sure that it's no easy feat for a manufacturer to get prose like that slung together so quickly. This review goes over the top with photography to match. You couldn't have gotten photos like Gizmodo's even if you stalked the reviewers all week! How? The light! It plays spectacularly across the inside of each COMPLETELY EMPTY BAG. The old real estate agent's trick of eliminating all furnishings works as well here as it does in the most claustrophobic bungalow.

The most amazing part of the Jansport review is that no mention is made of the laptop sleeve. It's not even included in the photo. The bag itself is otherwise barely suitable for a laptop. This is why Horn talked down the price of laptops to 'hundreds of dollars' even while the standard test article was an Apple machine with a starting price of $1800! This is why the bag is shown empty. A sales piece has to keep the set from upstaging the product.

What does this have to do with Piercing Pagoda? The technology isn't the thing here or there. The technology is the accessory. The bag -- "So soft. So attractive." -- or the earrings are the thing. Fine for a retail empire with "Piercing" in the name. Is it fine for a gadget review site that asserted journalistic privilege only two and a half years ago?

I'm talking about it over here at reograph to close out our dinosaur cycle with the third piece in a week. This time, the dinosaur is me.