December 31, 2006

Wakeboarding Magazine's 2007 Boat Buyers Guide... it is also a Boat Buyers Guide Guide

The 2007 Boat Buyer's Guide that starts on page 108 of the February issue of Wakeboarding Magazine is probably the most honest, yet still advertiser friendly, printed wake/ski boat buyer's guide that I've ever read.

Although The Wakeboard Report does not have any true advertisers right now, apart from our affiliate connection with Boardstop.com, we do have good relationships with certain companies and we know with whom we want to remain in good terms. We're online, we're not as well known, and as a result we are able to really say whatever we feel on this Web site. And for everything we've said, we've managed to elicit only one threat in our humble existence, and it came from a boat designer who you haven't heard of, from a boat manufcturer that you definitely have heard of, who threatened to try and harm our ability to make contacts in this industry. Awww! Poor lil guy. He must know that we don't have any to harm! But I digress. Our position is obviously very different from that which the editors and ad sales people at Wakeboarding Magazine are in. Sorry to get too Carrie Bradshaw here, but how honest can a respected publication be when the successes of the products it is reviewing pretty much pay the meal ticket. Ask Wakeboarding Magazine, because I think they've figured it out.

Take a little trip with me for a moment, back to the late 80's and early 90's, when a little future wakeboard industry journalist read the Water Ski Magazine Boat Buyer's guide and believed every word of it, simply because it was printed and thus, official. It was an exciting time for me; a time before my ability to read the sublanguage known as advertorial content had developed fully. Looking back, Water Ski Magazine's old Boat Buyers guides read something like:

The 1993 Ski Nautique is the best boat ever. It is perfect.
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The 1993 Bayliner Ski Challenger is the best boat ever made. It makes perfect itself, jealous.
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The 1993 Malibu Skier is the best boat ever made. It is so wonderful, that I fainted upon touching the upholstery. Twice.

...and so on. For 270 pages.

Back to 2007 now. Wakeboarding Magazine's new Boat Buyers guide strikes such a careful balance between candor and applause that everyone involved should be pretty happy with the result. Anyone with finicky tastes for wake boats can read between the lines when necessary, and anyone sitting on the third floor at a big boat manufacturer's headquarters reading the same article about their newest creation will be happy as well. If you're familiar with this site, you already know that we have extremely finicky tastes for the wakes that our boats create, and we can smell the falsies from a mile out. The individual entries in this guide are carefully crafted, and whether the overall piece is considered by Wakeboarding Magazine to be an advertorial or not, it was written very accurately and manages to spin everything in a positive tone without turbo-injecting candy-coated miracle glitter up our tail pipe. I can tell what entries in which they would have rather been more colorful and negative, and those in which they mean to say that they now own said superboat.

Among the expected series of top-class wake boats, they covered The Wakeboard Report's pet boats too. I am referring to the ones we covet the most and experience moments of wanderlust toward: The Super Air Nautique 220, the Malibu 247, and the Master Craft CSX 220. They appropriately nodded to the curious redesign and reintroduction of the Super Air Nautique 210, and nailed the review itself with a laser-guided missile.

The guide spans 50 pages, which compared to other guides, is short; to its credit. These guides aren't intended to get you to call the manufacturer and order your brand new wake boat right then and there. The guides are meant to get you out to a dealership for a demo day or a pull, and to answer a few questions ahead of time before you start your real research on such a large purchase. It manages to do this very effectively in a series of pithy 1 and 2 page photo-heavy spreads, instead of 4-5 page prewritten, almost teleprompted marketing make-out sessions - and I love it.

Posted by erik