Ad Age has been doing some important journalism this week reporting on the holiday swag it has been receiving from PR and media companies. We do miss our time toiling in the media prisons departments of agencies where we’d generally receive more gifts in one year what most people would hope to receive in five but we sure don’t miss the slave labor hard work and long hours put in to get those gifts pump out 300 version of a media plan for whiny account managers and self-important clients.
While many of the gifts we received deserved to be sent back we never actually bothered to send one back as Age Age did this week claiming it amounted to a journalistic bribe. You see, journalists must remain impartial and uninfluenced by outside sources where as media planers live in a world of back scratching and ain’t giving back all those free lunches, free drinks at industry parties and travel bribes packages given after reaching a certain expenditure level. No siree. So while we can understand why Ad Age refused the iPod from Rainbow Networks on which where promotional reels of the cable networks’ successes, we think they missed the point.
While our initial reaction to receiving our own video iPOd from GM touting its new Saturn Sky with images and video, we soon realized the iPod is simply a new and better medium through which to convey information from one party to another. After all, press releases are so, like, yesterday. While one could call the iPod-as-PR-medium a journalistic bribe, another could call it a well executed PR strategy. We settled on the latter and kept the iPod. And in true journalistic integrity, we don’t use it for anything except watching Saturn Sky videos and oggling images of the vehicle.
