The World of Swag
Dear Metrolink Rider,
Just in time for the New Year, Metrolink has launched our new online store, filled with Metrolink-branded merchandise for you and your loved ones.
From hats and jackets to backpacks and mugs, the new Metrolink Online Store has the perfect gift for friends, family, co-workers or the train enthusiast in your life. And, best of all, SoCal Explorer members get an extra 10% off, so sign up today!—An email I received the other day
Just got my Dremio SWAG from summer’s data lake conference #dremio
—A post in my LinkedIn feed
Now, Metrolink is southern California’s commuter rail. And Dremio is a datalaking product that allows multiple relational database instances to cohabitate on the cloud, making multi-database queries easy-peasy.
Both quality products, but odd choices for merchandise. To wear Dremio swag would require a true love for Dremio as a product—there are likely no Dremio posers. On the opposite side of things, unlike an AJJ patch or a SOPHIE sweatshirt, I think it’s unlikely that, if you go out with Dremio merch, people will approach you asking “What did you think of the latest update?”
Swag and merchandise from unlikely sources seems to be proliferating. Easy custom t-shirt sites like Teepublic and Teespring likely have helped here. And it’s not just big corporations getting into the strange swag game. The number of meme t-shirts from small creators, like Wyatt Duncan’s very tempting Neon Garfield Evangelion t-shirt, show how not-quite household names are getting into moichandising.
I’m, of course, saying this like dumb meme shirts and merch handed out at user group conferences have not been deeply important to me. I own an ironic Enron t-shirt—yes, there is still merchandise for long dead companies. My last laptop proudly displayed a SlicerDicer sticker, a product with a user base of maybe five thousand or so clinicians, though that includes Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha who used it to expose the lead in Flint.
But, well, I blog about consumption and reducing consumption, in part because I believe less consumption is critical to reducing our damage to the environment. Impulse meme purchases can’t jive with this. The Nothing New challenge was all about getting me to buy fewer stupid purchases, or at least get my dumb Garfield shirts secondhand.
But swag bags given out for Dremio or Epic’s many conferences are way, way worse. I already have a water bottle from the American Chemical Society and a tote bag from Sloan Science and Film, and I don’t think it’s a good thing that, should I attend a KLAS conference, that I would get another unrecyclable plastic water bottle and another t-shirt made from cotton whose fields once were a deciduous forest.
Some in the event planning industry have caught on to this fact. I loved this article by GEVME, an event management SaaS company, which discusses the exhausting practice of event freebies. If the event is destination, GEVME notes, attendees are likely to throw their swag bag in the hotel trash if their carry-on is already packed to brimming. And GEVME targets ruthlessly the conference tote bag, which is only useful if your attendees have attended literally 0 other conferences in their lifetime.
But, at least three other event management firms disagree with GEVME, and think event planners should go bolder with the swag. Here is EVENTMB telling you to give attendees charging banks—which sounds useful at first, but given that I received a Pomona Class of 2018 charging bank at my commencement, I don’t need one. Brindle Digital thinks totes and pop sockets will avoid the trash can, but human beings only have so many shoulders, and most people only have one phone and therefore only need one pop socket. And EventBrite, the Goliath of the industry, thinks you should give away decoder glasses and include hidden messages throughout your event. This… Isn’t even useful during the conference, let alone after it, which means it has the opposite problem of a tote bag; while I have more tote bags than shoulders, I’m going to throw away a decoder ring the second I decrypt my ad for Ovaltine.
The simple fact is most of this merchandise shouldn’t exist. Metrolink has a hideous kids jersey saying eco-friendly, but I can’t imagine buying a minimally Metrolink-branded kids shirt is very eco-friendly at all. I doubt anyone can recognize the layout of Metrolink’s lines—it’s not the “L” for goodness’ sake—so why did Metrolink decide to create a mug and tote with it? It’s not that these items are for nobody. I’m sure someone loves Metrolink enough to buy these. But, should an otherwise eco-friendly public transit service be selling tote bags and ceramics? And, given how slow I would expect these products to sell, the warehousing of them sounds like an environmental concern in itself. Do we really need a society where you can order a dumb meme shirt online, even though, likely, before the shirt even arrives, the joke will have already been played out? This Atlantic article by Taylor Lorenz does a great job highlighting how fickle a game monetizing a meme is, made more difficult by how quickly memes die. But, if this makes memes hard to monetize, then it is likely the case that meme merch is just as difficult to keep in wardrobes instead of landfills.
And swag bags? We should toss that idea in the trash entirely, because that’s where most of that swag ends up anyways.