This is the 21st century right?. I pick up the T3 2009 calendar and can't believe what I am seeing. I check it is 2009 and I have not found a vintage copy of the 1979 edition. Each month has a gadget of the month with a erotic shot of a girl 'wet' with excitement holding a strategically placed gadget in her legs, arms, breasts. January we have a woman with a see through slip on in water holding an android phone. February we have a women kneeling in hot steam holding an 'eco gadget'. March shows us a women with a touchscreen strategically placed in her bikini. Do I need to go on?
In my previous post, I demonstrated that women are a growth market while male markets are saturated. Marketers missing out on a £5billion pot of gold (a conservative figure according to Jupiter), I predict T3 will be out of business in a year. Their magazine relies on its core audience of "sexually repressed nerds" according to Wikipedia. All of whom have the skills to download real porn from bit torrent and don't need this half-hearted house tech-porn.
Showing the calendar to some male colleagues, one told me the only place he could see the calendar was "on the wall of kwik fit". Hardly an aspirational image for your average man with disposable cash. If you are trying to woo a girl, and she walks into your bedroom and see a copy of T3 or worse, the T3 2009 calendar, what sort of signal does that send? Even a sexually repressed nerd can think that one through. Some of the advertising in T3 is no better, this Asus ad being a good example.
Rather than default to a out of date, lazy way of selling technology to men at the expense of attracting women, technology brands need to be more innovative with their media strategies. Technology has become so accessible and embedded into our culture, that the hard sell of technology is no longer needed. There is no such thing as Early Adopters.
Tech brands need to think innovatively about to communicate to both men and women and buying a media strategy of tech porn like T3 just ain't going to cut it. What brands need to do:
1. Leverage the blogging community as they are the key influencers. Panasonic are doing this at CES. Who are you more like to trust for a product review- a blogger or a paid for reviewer?
2. Connect your audience to like minded people. This is a great way to earn their respect and ultimately their trust. At Hewlett Packard, we connected artists to others artists rather than advertise in tech magazines and talk about features of printers. This generated so much positive goodwill to HP.
3. Be brave. Be rebellious. And dont waste money on advertising in magazines like T3.
Goodbye T3 and Good Luck.
soapbox
Please expand Martin?
Err - didn't Michael Brook leave Stuff for T3? Just check your own hyperlink to the T3 website.
Yes you are right. Thanks for pointing out David
"Leverage the blogging community" you mean pay for their flights to a conference somewhere nice, pay their entry fee, stick 'em up in a nice hotel, feed them good food and a few drinks if they are partial to it and send 'em away home with a nice tech gift. Probably the one they were provided with to record the video and audio for the blog... that reviewer will be really trustworthy alright.
..but, no, I wouldn't buy T3 either
I sometimes review products for Cisco and Nokia. There's no 'bribe'- if I dont like the product I will not either not review it or review it negatively. If bloggers loose their objectivity and independence then they are no longer a valuable source of information. The majority of bloggers blog because they are interested in the topic. Give me the choice of a review in T3 or a non commercial blog and the blog wins hands down.
not only does the calendar use fairly naff low porn photography, the touch screen wouldn't work very well if continuously exposed to a wet and steamy environment...something else a nerdy teen might notice.
Recent experience suggests that the sleazey approach still works on the hardcore nerd.
A friend of mine runs a small, regional agency and one of the companies they have been working for has developed a complete stock control and inventory system for small distributors of tech equipment - from gadgets to components.
My friend went to them with a number of solid recomendations and 4 creative offers, with images and text to be run across DM, online disp/banner, email and home-page.
Two of the offers were good, clean impactful creative that sold the benefits of their service and looked great; the third used the idea of a 'vampish' looking lady and a typical nerd - agan good stuff, but a little cheeky visually - and the last featured a series of pictures of a very attractive (and quite impressively formed) young woman who had been dowsed head to toe in liquid chocolate.
He knew there was no way this would ever be acceptable for release, but put it in because the client had wanted something risque - and this ticked the nerd+porn box.
He had to (almost literally) fight the guy who ran the business in order to not use the 'softcore filth' (I have seen the shots and this is almost an understatement).
After much haggling, ranting and explaining of inappropriateness, the customer eventually settled for the images of the 'vampish' lady and the nerd - but demanded full quality outputs of the prefered creative to keep in the office (assk no questions!).
It therefore appears that porn does still hold sway in the strongly male environment of IT and peripherals.
Belinda Parmar
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Member since: 17 Aug 2008
Last login: 18 Nov 2009
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