The first time I went to SFN (Society for Neuroscience meeting), I was in awe of the "rep section" in the enormous conference center. An area the size of a football field was filled with over-educated salespeople trying to entice researchers to peruse their wares: the newest microscope, RNAi technology, custom-made antibodies. They were all set up, amidst the research posters, a veritable smorgasbord of free crap bearing company logos. Sometimes this stuff was really nice: I've acquired some decent pens, bags, single issues of journals, laser pointers, and sundry other bric-a-brac from these reps. And some of the stuff was like "this is negative advertising!" I got this one pen from Zeiss that was so crappy it worked for about 2 minutes before falling apart in my hand. I hope they made their microscopes better.
Now there's a blog, run by a doctor in private practice, who photographs and rates each piece of free rep stuff he gets from drug and equipment companies. Aptly called, Drug Rep Toys.
Drug representatives give out a vast array of trinkets in plying their trade. A while ago, while looking at the stack of pens I had amassed in a single day, I decided to start posting pictures of all the things I acquire from them. There isn't really an ulterior motive here, I don't think. Draw your own conclusions.
Got a cool drug rep toy? You can mail him a picture and he'll post it!
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Interesting blog. I've worked in various industries (food service, finance) and have been to various conferences and shows, and they all have crap like that. I wonder how much cheaper the products we buy would be if they stop handing out lame products pens and novelty poop. At least with food shows you get free food with the pen.
There's a cute word for these kinds of toys, too. They're called "chotkes." My favorites are the balls with lights inside that light up when they hit the ground.
In the banking biz they are called "premiums". They are usually extremely cheap, but "joltvolta" is right... There is no such thing as a free lunch, and the consumer is paying for it in the end.
Chotkes? Where in the world did that moniker come from?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tchotchke
"In addition, the 1999 movie Office Space features a tacky restaurant called "Chotchkie's."
The world makes a little more sense now. And I also love Office Space more.
My dad's vaccine company (which I shall not name here) handed out pens designed to look pretty much exactly like a syringe, a few years back. They even had some cool red liquid floating around in it. Wonderful way to freak people out on the subway, when you pull it out of your pocket to take some notes.
Shelley, free stuff is the only reason I go to conferences like these!
I have my own private selection of vendor mousepads, rubics cubes, 3D puzzles, and more coffee mugs than the local Starbucks, all decorating my office.
I also feel a bit perverse by using an Agilent mouse (with a 1200 HPLC replica floating in water inside it) with a Waters Acquity UPLC mousepad. tee-hehehehe
(and yes, I'm a pharmadork)
'Tchotchke' is a yiddish word and is used to generally describe lots of useless bric-a-brac (as you say)-- for example, figurines, miniatures, or any other strange useless item that collects dust and might sit on a shelf would be a tchotchke--
apt for these pharma items as well---
i have a friend who is an m.d. i never bought a single pen while i was in college. once a semester i would show up at his office and go begging for pens. he usually tried to foist other swag upon me such as calendars and post-it pads. one thing i did find useful was an entire case of soap. yeah, they were sample sized, but 36 or so bars of sample soap meant i didn't have to buy hand soap for quite a while. i just wish my mom would stop bringing home those squishy foam things home from the NAB and giving them to my kids.
Heh. They sure do like the squishy foam things don't they? My lab had a big blue Viagra pill thats a squishy from Pfizer. I've stolen it a few times to use in sundry Halloween costumes. :D
Shelley, FYI, the word is "sundry" (I wasn't going to say anything, but you misspelled it twice, differently each time.)
(SB: Thanks, corrected.)
And yeah, vendor stuff can be fun. When I was doing tech support for Cox cable modems, I got a magic 8-ball from Microsoft (celebrating, I think, the imminent release of XP service pack 1). I immediately used it to ask it questions like "Will Windows XP service pack 1 crash my computer?". The employees at the call center were amused; management, not so much.
My favorite vendor/recruiter junk was the overly optimistic magic eight ball. I got it during an interview with a recruiter from some company (I think it was Eli Lilly). Every single response it it was stuff like "the future looks bright with [company name]". I didn't even end up getting an offer from them either.
I went to PetWx (Petroleum Exploration trade fair) a few years ago get a couple of maps from the large-format printers they were selling, which was very nice.
The most pointless was a modem cable adapter, that didn't actually adapt the modem cable to any other kind of phoneline- it just plugged in the socket and advertised the manufacturer. Unless you have a desktop in which case you can't see it!
PetWx? PetEx silly me!
When I was a grad student, I used to take all the free crap I could carry--pens, candy, tchotchkies, journals, catalogs, etc.--from the exhibitors at SFN. Then I would lug the shit home, and pile it up in my carrel. After about two years of this, I realized that I never made any use whatsoever of any of the stuff, and since then I have an absolute policy of not taking *any* free crap.
I went to a job fair once where the firm running the fair was giving out Swiss Army knives and FM scanner radios. I didn't think it boded well for their future.
Interestingly, I believe "tchotchke" can also be used to mean "bimbo", but it doesn't seem to be a very common usage outside Jewish circles. (It's rather more insulting in Hebrew -- the borrowed form "tzatzke" is not so much "bimbo" as "slut"...)
I've had some experience with developing trade show swag. These things are so cheap in quantity that their impact on the bottom line (especially for a huge drug company) is trivial.
I had a Flonase nose once. A stuffed one, and by that I mean filled with downy material, not congested. It had two scrawny legs and vestigial arms, like a T. rex. It was about the size of a large pear, tacky, and hideously difficult to part with. For a time, lacking other stuffed animals, I even kept it on my pillow at night. I would coo to it during storms, and it to me during times of need. Sometimes it would crack wise about mild cheddar cheese and its distaste for page-boy haircuts. Come to think of it, maybe I could have used a Hal doll instead...