“Austerity Package”

Like many car companies, German automobile manufacturer Porsche has a long and storied history of stripping down and leaping head-first into the murky swimming pool that is the bicycle industry. Unlike, say, Jeep, our infinitely sensible German friends, however, traditionally take the time to make sure there’s water in the pool.

I’ve honestly never understood why some car companies choose to license their name to such horrendous and potentially fatal “bicycle-shaped objects,” but I think it says something about American consumerism that there’s even a market for such a thing. A lot of us are dumbasses.

Speaking of dumbasses, the photo for the Jeep “Comanche Sahara” bicycle above was found on a site called Jeep Tech Tips, and is an example of something called “Content Marketing,” the “male-enhancement product” of the marketing world. In short, Content Marketing is the act of paying a mindless tool with no particular interests to write terminally uninteresting and useless text about a product and distribute this anti-information as thoroughly as possible on the interwebs, in the hope of catching the Eye of Sauron algorithms of Google. It’s an odd twist on the B-movie high-school paradigm, where the socially inept nerds try to attract the attention of the vacuous cheerleaders; here, the completely unoriginal and inane are hell-bent on figuring out how to win the affection of nerds who write search engine algorithms.

Eventually computers will write this mindless dreck, or the need to buy a really shitty Jeep bicycle will able to be added directly to our brains as an ingredient in Red Bull, but until then, some poor son-of-a-bitch writes sentences like this for a living:

While I agree that, “The Commando would be more idle for a young teenager (13 or 14 years old),” particularly considering that no one over the age of nine would be able to fit on the bike, I suspect the word our “content marketing” was searching for there was “ideal,” and with that, I have to politely disagree.

The problem with information written to get the attention of computers is that occasionally humans run into it, and accidentally read it. Considering the entire point of writing this shit in the first place is to attract eyeballs, you’d thing there would be a value in communicating information that would actually answer people’s questions, but Content Marketing isn’t about providing information–it’s about getting noticed. In fact, it’s sort of the opposite of providing information.

Consider: “The only performance difference is that the Comanche Toledo has a rear shock.” This refers to the blue bike above, the one that doesn’t have a rear shock. Content written, paycheck in the bank, another productive day over: well done, Content Writer.

Our friends at Porsche, meanwhile, do not put their logos on just any tack-welded piece of heinous shit that comes down the pipe. They go out of their way to put their logo on truly bizarre pieces of ultra-high-tech shit that comes down a hand-laid carbon fiber pipe. Remember the Votec bikes?

You have to admit, they always at least try to do something different, and they’re doing it again in 2012 with the “RS,” a carbon fiber 29er with XTR components and Crank Brothers everywhere. Brakes, of course, had to be Magura (this whole Euro crisis isn’t going to solve itself, you know), which makes you wonder how irked the German luxury brands must be to routinely have to spec Japanese or Italian components on their fashion-accessory bicycles. Speaking of Google, if only Porsche, Audi, Mercedes and BMW had “20% free time to develop your own ideas” concepts in place for employees like those guys do, maybe we’d already have a full German gruppo.

Sadly, at nearly $10,000 for the RS pictured at the top of this post, I think I’d probably stick with a better looking Air 9 Carbon or Highball frame and save my money for the only real Porschycle.