Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Is IBM on Crack??! Has Print Media Gone Stoopid?


Today I received another monthly installment of tree-killing magazines which I've tried to cancel for (no, I'm not kidding at all) 3 YEARS.  Every issue of eWeek, InformationWeek, and so on, says "Act Now!  This is your LAST ISSUE!"

So I open each to skim through the ads.  After all, there's hardly anything to read in between all the inserts, flyouts, glue-ins and fold-outs.  Once you pull that crap out, the thickness of the "product" falls to less than half of what it was beforehand.  That's a mathematical fact, by the way.

Now I get down to the "meat" of each publication.  The meat is broken down as follows:

   20% old, dated news, already worn out on the Internet
   20% editorializing with only sprinkles of factual foundation
   20% thinly coated marketing shlock painted to appear as a "review"
   40% permanent ads (the kind you can't easily ripout)

Of the 40% ads, in each magazine no less, is a series of IBM's latest puff of the crackpipe marketing ideas:  Going Green.  Yes.  Going Green.  Green in their view must mean consuming trees like a busload of starved football players dumped off at the nearest Golden Corral.  All you Can Eat buffet of trees here baby.   Page after page of glossy, colorful, ink-ridden bullshit ads about how IBM loves nature and is going to prove it by sucking your ozone-depleting budget dry as a bone.

Excuse me, but WTF are they thinking?  Didn't anyone in one of those crackfest big-blue marketing meetings say "hey, guys, um, uhh, do you think this is really a good idea?  Placing six to eight pages of glossy printed ads about going 'green' throughout all the tech mags?"  I'm sure if that person did, they're at home pushing job applications while collecting unemployment.  The marketing team is probably led by the former heads of the wildly successful OS/2 Warp division I suppose.  Or maybe it was those guys that handled the Texas IT outsourcing "issue" with those questionable backups.  Oops.  Sorry guys.

Here's an idea: If you really want to pay for printed ads in tech magazines which focus on "going green", maybe it would be better to print them on toilet paper and include a notice that says you can wipe your ass after reading.  I always knew I should have gone into marketing.

No comments: