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A scantily clad, alabaster-skinned brunette, apparently floating in water, seductively releases a Palm III and stylus in your general direction.
You're gawking at the latest issue of BRAVEpalm, a "gadget gazette" entirely devoted to the lifestyle of 3Com's Palm Pilot.
Part operations report, part product catalog, and part fashion-forward lifestyle magazine, the gadget gazette is an increasingly favored way for companies to communicate both with their customers and their shareholders -- all while building their brand in a marketplace where only a select few products command obsessive, fan-like loyalty.
"It's not especially new, this sort of soft-sell," says Stephen Duncombe, assistant professor of American studies at State University of New York, Old Westbury. "Think of the in-flight magazine. Besides, companies have been using lifestyle-based pitches to sell their products since at least the 'teens and '20s."
Still, what seems new is the sheer number of such communiqués in the era of data smog, as chunks of advertorial content increasingly crop up in everything from Vogue to Business Week to The New Yorker. We have grown accustomed, in other words, to advertorial's face.
Nokia's Discovery is a relatively content-rich gadget gazette, almost intended more for sector analysts than for general readers. The theme of the Spring 1998 issue is "Malaysia's Call to the Future," and its pages are packed with features about Nokia's 12-year tie-up with Telekom Malaysia and projects like Malaysia's Multimedia Supercorridor (a Silicon Valley-style real estate development).
Iridium's Roam, by contrast, splits the difference between Conde Nast Traveler and Forbes. The Second Quarter 1998 issue (note that Iridium's audience appears to be readers who think in business time) sets ads for the Nicklaus/Flick Golf School and Royal Caribbean International alongside an interview with Tom Peters and a story on the K@tmandu Cybermatha Tea House. Iridium's Michelle Lyle says the magazine is aimed at "potential customers, corporate travelers, and the media." Iridium, a consortium of companies including Sprint, Lockheed Martin, and SK Telecom, is putting up 66 low-orbit satellites to create a wireless communications network that will allow customers to roam (get it?) "virtually anywhere in the world with one phone and one phone number."
Roam's product-based copy is mostly innocuous, including a story on Motorola's development of Iridium phones (Motorola owns 20 percent of Iridium). In fact, if anything, Roam tries to generate demand where supply is as yet unrealized. It is a gadget gazette that is, so far, mostly a tease.
Not that one should underestimate foreplay as a primary component in commercial transactions. If anything, the "experience economy," as B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore call it in the July-August Harvard Business Review, is becoming more a part of our lives every day. It's this part of techno-fetishism that Jonathan Glaser, president of handheld computer distributor New World Technologies, targets with BRAVEpalm.
"I came to the realization," Glaser says, "that the handheld computer is not just a product, but a lifestyle object, a product into which people are putting their whole lives. We wanted to develop a publication that would communicate that concept.
"The one intent we had was to do something very 'fashion-forward,' in the manner of Elle or Vogue or even George magazine, which puts forth politics in a lifestyle magazine manner."
Glaser has certainly succeeded. BRAVEpalm -- which shipped to 400,000 people -- places testimonials from such notables as Jezebel's Heather Champ above product and price listings.
"The catalog has generated great emotion," says Glaser, admitting "there is a category of people who find it inappropriate."
The success of gadget gazettes is that they do what objects cannot: They put the product into a context, an environment that shows the product being used. And seeing a young woman in a bathing suit holding a Palm III certainly beats gnawing through shrinkwrap with your teeth, reading the user's manual, and losing your stylus down the elevator shaft.
On the other hand, the failure of such publications is that, in Stephen Duncombe's words, "the logic behind and purpose of editorial and ad copy are [still] diametrically opposed." Nokia, for example, wouldn't get away with its relatively even-handed prose using BRAVEpalm's Victoria's Secret-style design elements, and it's hard to imagine an Iridium shareholder buying an Iridium-branded laptop case.
Gadget gazettes are an interesting gamble, however -- one that hinges on what Duncombe calls "the continual blurring of reporting and selling." If such publications proliferate -- and include real content as opposed to product placement or operations reviews -- they may end up serving as a kind of readable Rolfing, massaging our psyche as well as our wallets.
