• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, September 2, 2011

Following Apple's stunning success of once again garnering press by leaving an unreleased iPhone in a bar, PR firms all over the country have launched a new capability that offers to leave client products and internal memos in taverns, bars, restaurants and nightclubs.

"We are closely studying the Apple model," WIT Strategy Uber Clip-Getter Mark Naples might have told Over the Line, had we bothered to pick up the phone and call him, which we didn't. "We see that the first time they left the iPhone was in a German beer garden and this time, a Mexican restaurant and bar. We have three analysts working around the clock to see which ethnic restaurant produces the best ROI for Apple in terms of pick-up. We think the fact that Gizmodo paid 5 grand for last year's phone and was subject to a criminal investigation gives the German restaurant choice more coverage legs. But we'll see."

Apparently reporters in bars are indifferent to hardware that isn't made by Apple.

"We had a client with this really cool new game controller that could translate your eye movements into actions like shooting a zombie by blinking," one San Francisco PR firm didn't tell OTL. "We left about a hundred of them in every frickin' bar and nightclub from Berkeley to San Jose. After picking them up and pointing them at the TV and finding they were not hooked up, most people just tossed them on the floor. It would be nice if reporters would wear like, those fedoras with PRESS cards in the headbands to help us minimize our loses. So far the client is pretty pissed."

Other PR firms are grumbling that it is harder to leave a software-based ad targeting "solution" or a mobile app on a bar for someone to find and try to sell on Craigslist.

"We left our entire closed-loop offering on a CD in a bar in Encino and manned a nearby table 24/7 for over a week, but the only time anyone touched the CD was to use it as a coaster," one behavioral targeting company could have told OTL, but did not. "After it was sloshed with bourbon and gin for a couple of days, it would have been pretty hard to get it to load anyway. Clearly there is some science to what Apple is doing."

Meanwhile, police have responded to over 50 calls from taverns in the Silicon Valley area to resolve disturbances caused by reporters picking up the mobile phones of other bar patrons when they turn their heads or stagger off to the bathroom.

"This is a really low percentage game," a reporter with Tech Crunch said, speaking "off the record" and only after forcing OTL to sign an agreement not to use their quotes before they appeared first in TC. "You have to pick up and examine a lot of devices to find one that hasn't technically been released yet. And it only gets harder after three or four rounds of tequila shots. After a while a cell phone is a cell phone, know what I mean?"