Gentle reader, allow me to introduce you to the Buy.com model girls. (Should you wish to see these ladies in, ahh, context, you may click for a larger image.)

They come from “buy magazine,” the “magalogue” from buy.com. This approach to drive traffic to an e-comerce site has been done before and is worthy of discussion. So is the use of quasi-editorial à la A&F Quarterly.

Of course, at the moment I have no interest in those discussions. I’m just fascinated by how gratuitous these girls are. A few other girls in the catalog actually pretend to use the products, but most are just eye candy. Why? Does this drive sales? Are buy.com customers overwhelmingly (straight) males? Does anyone actually believe that getting a Palm Zire will in any way get a hot chick in a cowboy hat to write her phone number on it, as page 32 suggests? What do women think of all this?

It was at this point that I was going to launch into a mini-rant about the use of pretty people to dress up just about anything. Then I realized why I opened the damn thing in the first place. So I’ll just shut up now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 7th, 2003 at 12:17 am and is filed under Advertising, WtF.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.