I came down this morning to an unusual email: a company issuing a limited-edition bobblehead offering me one if I were to use the vast power of my Peanuts fan platform to let said fans know that this bobblehead was available for purchase. I’ve been offered materials for review before – a few books, and for a brief period, apparel – but this is the first time I have been offered a reward for the act of letting folks know something exists.
I’m being treated as an influencer.
I have no particular comment to make on the product itself, which I’ve seen only in the image you see here, and which as a collector of Peanuts books rather than Peanuts bobbleheads (close in alphabetical order, but still quite different) isn’t really aimed at me. And yet I’m being given the same chance as those celebrities who make certain that their fancy bottle of H2O has the label facing outward in their posted selfies, the chance to sell mere exposure for a specific reward. Really, I’m being asked to sell access to you.
The AAUGH Blog is not immune to commerce. Ads have appeared on the guide pages, and the products we link to often have affiliate links, which I state on the blog page itself, it’s not something I hide; the income helps justify the time I’ve spent for decades on this odd project. Our semi-functional blog-by-mail system is from a service that supports itself by adding ads to the emails (none of that lump of money goes to me.)
And so here I am actually doing this, not really to gain the offered inducement itself – which is a bobblehead for me (“you and your team” — my team?), and as I said, not quite my thing – but to gain the experience of having been an influencer in the commercial sense.
The 8″ object is $75 and will be available at this link: FOCO – Peanuts – Collectibles – Bobbleheads (looks like you can pre-order Snoopy and Woodstock dressed in the outfits of a bunch of different football and baseball teams, which I suspect is the real goal of this promotion; FOCO is primarily a sports-object company. Although I do have an objections to this specific statue, because we do know canonically that Woodstock is not an Eagle.)
‘scuse me now. I gotta go see if my new influencer status can help me influence my son into getting out of bed and on to school.
