13 May 2008
Jumping the sticker shark
Posted by Alistair Croll under: Communicating; Standing out; Startups .
Notebook stickers are the badge of pride of many a Web 2.0 denizen. It’s unlikely that an IBM Thinkpad will be festooned with colorful logoes and strange sayings, but head to any campus and you’ll see that the back of a Mac is the new car bumper.
Stickers do more than profess your technical leanings. They’re a labor of love. And that love comes from having to work for them. In some cases, companies only hand out their stickers at special events. Or they make commemorative ones. There are blogs (like Stickergiant) devoted to Sticky Love. And some sites sell them if you weren’t able to attend their event, usually through self-publishing sites like Cafepress.
Once, stickers had street cred. But now, scruffy-haired basement entrepreneurs toting the requisite messenger bag troll from booth to booth, trying to grab a sticker without having to sit through a sales pitch. Still, there’s some effort involved.
A while back, Startup Schwag realized there was a currency in the stickers and T-shirts that are a kind of by-product of startup culture, and started sending out grab bags of stuff. The startup gets visibility; the subscriber gets momentary thought leadership; and Startup Schwag nets a cool $15.
But it’s definitely hitting mainstream. At Web2Expo in mid-May, Yahoo was giving out placemats of stickers, rather than individual ones. Have they jumped the shark? Certainly, this is the challenge of Big Internet — how does one maintain the allure of secrecy, of being “in”, while still achieving the economies of scale that investors anticipated. To me, this sticker placemat is a metaphor for many of the challenges Yahoo faces.
Don’t get me wrong — I grabbed one of them. But it’s more to hide the fact that I have a cheap Acer, rather than a glowing Mac.
At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
Maybe I’ll go find some blog bumper stickers to make me feel better.
One Comment so far...
John Fischer Says:
14 May 2008 at 9:31 am.
StickerGiant has a new line of laptop/notebook stickers that are in beta testing. They are real vinyl with real silkscreen inks and can be die-cut to any shape you desire. These are not the cheap ink-jet crap you get at the print-on-demand sites, but th real thing, old school vinyl die-cut crack and peel with a removable adhesive for your equipment. http://www.stickergiant.com/custom_stickers/laptop-stickers.html