Moving towards a new understanding of minimalism
By Roy Gregory
Who reviews what can be telling – but what it tells you depends entirely on the situation. In the case of magazines or websites that sell advertising (to manufacturers or dealers) and content (to readers), the products reviewed will reflect the competing demands of commercial pressure and product profile: advertisers want their pound of flesh, while publishers want a nice, topical product to stick on the front cover. Of course, the very fact that advertising influences both content and brand profile means that quite often, it’s perfectly possible to reach a happy compromise that meets both expectations. Likewise, when the Awards issues swing by, the correspondence between advertising presence and the award winners is far too neat to be coincidental – a bit like the Oscars rewarding the biggest grossing films, rather than the best.
The flip side of that coin is natural congruence: manufacturers will naturally gravitate towards and support (with advertising) those magazines that appreciate the products, or sort of products, they produce. Sometimes the great product generates a great review and that attracts advertising: Sometimes it happens the other way round. But either way, the commercial relationship is well established when it comes to deciding which products get covered. Readers can judge for themselves the ‘direction of travel’… But one thing you should never underestimate is the exhausting level of detailed planning, organisational juggling, politics and ego massage all this inserts into the publishing process, a burden that falls firmly and solely on editorial shoulders.
Yet one thing that most high-volume magazines can’t avoid is the demand to keep products separate, so that the competition doesn’t get a look in and no accompanying product steals the limelight. Manufacturers want their products reviewed in isolation so that they can maximise the value of that review in marketing terms. It’s the hidden driver behind the ‘one in/one out’ review model, where the reviewer inserts the product into his (or occasionally her) reference system and duly passes judgement. The limitations of such an approach are obvious, if you just stop and think, yet that doesn’t stop the majority of commercially produced publications or keyboard warriors clinging to the practice.
But such concerns, while real, are not what interest me in this case. I’m looking at what we can learn from an altogether different set of circumstances – and what we can learn about ourselves from those events. When it comes to a site like Gy8, the selection process – and the motivation – is entirely different. Yet, in its own way it is no less telling. The most obvious distinction is in how equipment is selected for review: with no commercial imperative, we get to choose products that interest us, from companies we feel are responsible and reputable. We can ignore products that we don’t enjoy: it doesn’t mean that you won’t like them but, frankly, why would we waste our time explaining why they don’t do it for us – and why would you want us to? More importantly, because they’ve got no carrot to wave at us (or club to beat us with) we get to ignore those companies we wouldn’t encourage customers to get involved with – no matter how much they huff and puff or how big a stick they wave around.
