Let’s ‘Totes’ Stop with the Shitty Conference Swag

Let me tell you something stupidly obvious. The world today is not the world it was ten or fifteen years ago. That, and it’s really different from what it was twenty years ago.

People do everything differently now. We correspond differently, we get news differently, we fall in love differently. We eat, travel, learn and fuck in totally different ways, with totally different mindsets. You’d think swag would also be different. It’s not – not really – but it should be.

I recently came across an article on FastCompany.com called “It’s time to stop spending billions on cheap conference swag” (Nov. 2, 2018). Agreed.

The lede posits: We’re facing a full-on environmental crisis. Do you really need another flimsy tote or pen? I mean, do you? Do you really need a printed out card emblazoned with some sort of code or offer? Another container of lube that doesn’t have a dispenser top? Do you really need another shitty charger that only kinda works once?! The answer is no.

How big of a waste is this stuff?

Article author Elizabeth Segran outlined some swag-relevant stats, starting with tote bags.

“When you think about all of the energy and resources that go into making [just one tote bag]… the impact is staggering,” Segran wrote.

“Such bags are often made out of cotton with its own environmental footprint, or plastic made from oil. In most cases, they are sewn together in low-wage factories in China, then shipped around the world. And for what purpose? So that a company can marginally improve its brand recognition by stuffing them with pamphlets and handing them out at an event,” she continued.

Think about that. Segran points out that she herself keeps one or two key bags from brands or experiences she especially loves – and I myself lug around my SXSW bag like I’m some sorta celebrity speaker or something – but how many similar bags get tossed away? If I’m being honest, most of them don’t even make it out of my hotel room after whatever conference is concluded.

It’s about more than just bags though. In breaking down the promotional products industry in the United States, which according to Segran is currently worth $24 billion and has grown by 2.5 percent over the last five years, tote bags only make up 8.4 percent of total promotional product sales. T-shirts represent more than a quarter of sales, writing instruments make up 6.1 percent and various tech accessories, like USB drives, make up 7.5 percent.

Be honest: When was the last time you wore that free promo tee? And USB drives — Who are these even for in 2018?

To add another layer to this knotted puzzle of waste, there are 26,413 businesses in the promotional products industry, which employs 392,820 people. In other words, there may not be many people actually utilizing the promo USB drives, but there’re a damn lot of people dependent upon manufacturing them.

Here’s the thing. In porn, as budgets have tightened, swag has certainly minimized. But minimized is not the same as disappeared — and it’s definitely not the same as “gotten more clever.”

Though the days of walking a show floor and stuffing multiple swag bags with multitudes of… more swag – ahhh 2006, sigh – are long gone, there’s still a lot of crap to be gotten at industry shows. Pens, little pads of paper, little pads of sticky paper, lighters, gross “mints” made mostly of sugar, liquid eyeliner (great to practice with, not gonna lie), nail polish, makeup brush sets (good one!), coffee cups, mouse pads (wtf?), paper leis, terrible branded sunglasses and – my wasteful fav – a blinking red “alarm” light with a glue-on back. These are just the things that came to the top of my head from shows held this year.

What to do for promo if not the shitty swag?

Here’s the thing – and Segran also makes this point: What if we just didn’t do any of it? What if we focused on experiences? Or, rather than something cheap and shitty, what if there were valuable items in less gluttonous, disposable supply?

At the YNOT Cam Awards in October, Sex.com did a Twitter red carpet pic contest. Simple instructions for would-be participants were something like: Tweet your red carpet pic with a certain hashtag or two and win one of three fancy ass webcams. From this little promo, the company got a great general social media bump and an even greater bump from the three delighted winners. Maybe it cost more to buy three webcams than it did to buy 1,000 bulk printed lighters, but what made more of an impact?

Segran suggested that people just forego the swag on their own. Meaning, don’t take the pens, don’t palm the lighter and def skip the lip balm. It’s made of petroleum and has no SPF anyway. This is a great idea, but I’ve also seen what happens to leftover swag and DVDs and general crap that doesn’t get spoken for at conferences. It all ends up in the trash one way or the other.

What if we took this “don’t take” initiative one step beyond and, as businesses, got a bit more clever with promo. Not only do we stop with the crap, but we also think about more meaningful ways to replace it — ideally with something that doesn’t require oil and fire and exploitation to create it.

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