I’m a bit bothered about the idea of Matter boxes.

What are they? They’re “a new and unique idea in communications that brings companies and people together around real, physical stuff–things you can hold in your hands, keep in your drawer, or give to your friends”, but that just sounds to me like marketing, or promotion, or PR, or plain old advertising.

Oooh, bringing “companies and people together”, I don’t like the sound of that at all.

What does anyone get out of it?

You get a nicely packaged box of, well, stuff. Fairly random stuff too. Some soap. Some shower gel. A tiny box of cereal. A Virgin Atlantic calendar.

It reminds me of the corporate tat I used to get bombarded with, back when I had a proper job in a newsroom. Promotional stuff would pour in, most of it useless, vast amounts of it chucked in the bin. Not just by me, but by every other journalist in the room.

It also reminds me of a time, shortly after going freelance, when I was asked to help put together a marketing campaign for an air show. Hardly my area of expertise, but I turned up anyway to offer what help I could. The first meeting was to decide the contents of the inevitable “goody bag”, and inevitably the first raft of ideas were predictable: more useless tat. A T-shirt. Some stickers. A key ring.

I got exasperated and said: “This is all rubbish. No-one wants any of this stuff, it will just get chucked out. Let’s start from another direction: how much are you prepared to pay for each goody bag?”

The answer was a considerable amount (I don’t remember the exact figure). But it was enough for me to suggest: “Why not buy a bunch of Palm Pilots and fill each one of them full of infomation about the show? Contacts for all the exhibitors, all the talks and press events in the calendar, everything? Make it something useful, something people will actually want, something they will use.”

I’m not suggesting that Matter should be sending out free consumer electronics; but I do wonder how much it has cost to put each beautiful box together, and what genuinely useful object(s) could have been supplied to customers for the same price.

For me, the matter with Matter is the choice of matter inside it. It would so much more worthwhile if it contained stuff that mattered.