👜Swag swag sweet marketing swag
A16z's future and hacking newspaper headlines for SEO. CONTEXT COLLAPSE! 103
Today in Context Collapse!: Promo swag in the post-pandemic age, why local news flunks Facebook’s algorithms and a16z’s new in-house magazine.
Programming note: I’m headed to Miami in early July. Would love intros to interesting tech/advertising/marketing/media folks over there - let me know.
Confession time. For a grown adult, I spend a lot of time thinking about promo swag. I spend a lot of time thinking about where to source the best branded bottle openers to give away at conferences and how to put together gift boxes for clients. It is what it is.
Once upon a time, I received a ton of swag.
When you work as a journalist in the tech industry, you get a target marked on your head for backpacks, water bottles and so many shirts. I’d return from conferences with carry-on bags full of random. My publication had piles of random things received from every brand name you could imagine.
The nicest swag I ever got was a very nice backpack with a very discreet logo from a b2b tech company. The most used swag was a water bottle from a TV manufacturer that’s made it through two cross country moves. The most beloved was a teddy bear from a snack brand that showed up in a friend’s kid’s pictures for years.
Then I switched to advertising, and then to consulting. Instead of swag being a bombardment method to get your brand on some poor journalist’s radar to write about you, swag turned into a subtle method of brand one upmanship. It’s a fact of life that every agency judges every client and every vendor on the promo gifts they send.
And the pandemic changed swag for years to come.
Swag Taxonomy
Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of promo swag:
Mass market swag: Relatively low value, though not always. Primary use case = brand recognition. Easy to source. Branded pens, USB chargers, tshirts, etc. Designed for mass distribution at trade shows, public events or at IRL locations.
VIP swag: Nicer and costs a bit more than its mass market counterpart, though it’s less about cost but intent. Primary use case = relationship building. Harder to source. Can be anything from backpacks to food to watches or jewelry to electronics and beyond. Designed for distribution at 1:1 meetings or at private events.
Remote swag: Designed to introduce others to products and services when in-person experiences are difficult. Primary use case = brand explanatory. Harder to source. Typically less about “nice things” (though it often includes nice things) then about sharing a clearly planned experience for someone who can’t physically be there. Often overlaps with both VIP and mass market swag. Designed for sending to meeting contacts or VIPs.
Swag, Post-Pandemic
COVID-19 did an extremely good job of disrupting the global trade show industry and of making IRL business meetings difficult-to-impossible in much of the world.
But human beings, no matter how much they insist otherwise, are social creatures who depend on interpersonal relationships, respond to gifts, and seek engagement in a larger whole.
Promo swag is part of that process. Every brand tshirt a booth at CES gives away and every free iced coffee you get from that street team at the mall is a tiny, tiny piece of relationship building.
The pandemic threw a huge wrench into that process. If you’re a sales rep who isn’t stopping by a client for a site visit because the office is closed, you can’t send those cool cookies with your company’s logo printed on them to your client. If you’re a tech company trying to recruit talent, there were no in-person college job fairs to make sure every single attendee got a funny t-shirt showing off how cool your brand is so you’re on their radar when they graduate next year.
Instead, there’s more of a transition to marketing swag as a stand-alone product that’s going to last in 2023 and beyond. I’m thinking of things like customized gift packages for remote workers and marketing/comms people putting money that would normally be spent on client/influencer wining and dining on more detailed informational boxes instead to send to recipients following meetings. And for the Oscars gifting model to become more common for VVIPs as travel for in-person events continues to be difficult.
What Makes Swag Good
At the end of the day, promo swag is designed for a specific goal: Building profiles and relationships. The effectiveness of swag is linked to that process.
Once upon a time, going to SXSW or CES would mean that I had extra tshirts to wear to the gym or sleep in for years and years and years. Did that benefit the companies who were giving them out? I have no idea. Maybe having a Fast Company reporter wearing your tshirt at the hotel gym in San Jose was lucrative free advertising for that company! Maybe it wasn’t! Who knows.
But… but but but… there’s an economy of scale in giving out 500 tshirts to people who mostly work in your industry and where at least some of them are likely to wear it around people who also work on your industry. Giving a junior-year college student at a job fair a nice backpack with your company’s logo could benefit you when they’re looking for a job the next year and that act of goodwill put your company on their radar.
And G-d knows that brands spend a fortune on sending custom gifts to people in positions of influence in order to grab a teeny, tiny bit of attention and mental space. That won’t change, and it’s even more important these days when doing in-person events is just a bit harder.
Facebook’s Algorithm & Local News
Something really interesting from Popular Information’s Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria: How Facebook’s algorithm devalues local reporting.
Basically, their argument goes like this: Facebook, the site/app, is one of the main ways Americans get news. Engagement on Facebook (Shares, comments and likes) = referral traffic for websites that generate important ad revenue. The more engagement articles get on Facebook, the more likely people are to see it.
Legum and Zekeria looked at one of the most popular news sources on Facebook, Ben Shapiro’s right wing-leaning Daily Wire, and which articles from the Daily Wire performed well on Facebook. Like a lot of digital-first media outlets, the Daily Wire’s articles frequently paraphrase or excerpt coverage that first appeared in other publications and then repackage it for their audience.
What they found is that many of the Daily Wire’s best performing articles on Facebook were local news stories repackaged with headlines and photos that appealed to national audiences. As they put it, “Local journalists do the reporting. The Daily Wire gets the traffic.”
It’s important to note here that Popular Information is a left wing publication and the Daily Wire is, well… not. The Daily Wire isn’t the only outlet that pairs news stories with sensationalized headlines and visuals designed for maximum engagement. There are right wing outlets that do it, left wing outlets, and everything in-between.
With that said, Facebook’s news algorithms and which stories are featured on which users’ Facebook feeds is still kind of a black box! Zekeria and Legum did a huge service in deciphering just a bit of how that works—and we’re better off for it.
Future-branded Content
Venture capital fund/tech industry cultural signifier Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) just launched their own publication, Future.
Honestly? It looks good. Future has some smart articles (I especially enjoyed Patrick Rivera’s guide to crypto tokens) and does what it set out to do: Showcase a16z as an authority in the tech space where it invests so much money.
Co-founder Marc Andreessen specifically and a16z, to a lesser degree, as a whole are known for confrontational anti-mass media stances. In many ways, it ironically works in generating media coverage for the firm: Twitter is a theatre of public opinion cosplay, and prominent investors picking fights online generates great storylines. I guarantee you that Bloomberg, Fortune, and Protocol all wouldn’t have written articles about a VC fund starting its own in-house publication otherwise.
Future is what it is: A well-made, well-written in-house publication with deep dives on tech topics related to the areas where a16z invests. There are plenty of other best-in-class in-house publications from the tech world like Stripe’s Increment and Salesforce’s sprawling content empire (which now apparently includes a print magazine!); Future has a good start and is in a very beneficial place for the future.
Job Listings
Newsletter friends Vivid+Co are looking for a Copywriter / Editor based in NYC.
Sightline Media Group is looking for a Digital Strategy & Operations Associate based in either NYC, DC or LA.
Have a job opportunity you want to promote to our industry-centric readership? Let us know and we’re happy to include a link in our next issue.