Happening in the Back Row chat: Paid subscribers can sound off on the second Phoebe Philo drop, which hit the internet yesterday. (The first chat thread on Philo’s launch was one of my favorites ever.)
Each holiday season, one thing can be counted on to presage the inflation of lawn Santas: the internet being stuffed like a turkey with holiday gift guides.
I used to find these product recommendations more helpful than not. Sometimes I still do. But the SEO-driven the race to the bottom of media has meant two things: one, that getting kickbacks from on-site purchases, many of which come through Googling “gift ideas for women” or whatever, are more important to publishers’ bottom lines than ever, and two, that publishers need to recommend a lot more stuff to us to maximize those profits. Thus, no longer is it enough to publish a solitary gift guide from the editors at X publication — X publication has to release, like, eight gift guides into the universe by the time the bell rings on the first day of school to have a chance of ranking in search.
The result is that gift guides in aggregate have become the thing they were supposed to defeat — something to sift through and puzzle over rather than true curation. Finding the perfect gift in a guide often feels like trying to find something good to watch on streaming. To wit, I have read through gift guides for “tomato girls,” TikTok teens, sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, Pokémon fans, and people having a ninth anniversary. I have scrolled through lists of sex toy advent calendars, luxury advent calendars, and quiet luxury gifts “for everyone on my list.” I looked at so many beauty product gift lists that I feel confident saying they are the baking competition show of gift guides.
Adding to the insanity are gift guides from retailers and brands themselves. In a nod to peak cultural decline, Wal-Mart is shoveling its gift recommendations into a video series airing on TikTok, YouTube, and RoKu that it’s calling “RomCommerce.” (In all sincerity, Wal-Mart, you have absolutely nothing on Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop Gift Guide commercial featuring all the most iconic Gwyneths, so take several seats.) Meanwhile, proving all publicity is good publicity, Dior’s gift guide promotes a version of the advent calendar it got massively trolled for last year that’s now $700 more expensive — for a total of $4,200. It looks almost affordable compared to their $8,200 Sauvage Elixir x Baccarat (aka 500 mL of cologne) and $4,400 Miss Dior Eau de Parfum (6.8 ounces) that comes in a “couture trunk case.”
The gift guides have become so overwhelming that I suspect many consumers are more likely to take recommendations from TikTok influencers, newsletter writers, or celeb mega-recommender types like Gwyneth, whose gift guides come with a sense of humor and whimsy and serve as both entertainment and service. Consumers are savvy enough to know about things like Amazon and Nordstrom publisher kickbacks, and will likely suspect that a lot of these magazine website gift guides are just pay for play (which, well, they are). Of course, influencers get kickbacks too, but they often make the case that they’ve tried things and can personally vouch for them, which is all we want when the Saks gift section alone includes 1,810 items!
As I went through so many gift guides, I often landed on products — recommended without so much as a wink — that made me wonder, Do people gift these things? Here’s a breakdown of some of what I found in the wide world of SEO gift guides. (Tap the headline to read this post in full in your browser because it might get cut off in your email.)
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