Contact: Dave Green, NTK, dave@davegreen.co.uk
The perfect Christmas gift for disgruntled dot-com ex-employees everywhere:
"I got £80million in venture capital for my .com idea
- and all I have left is this lousy T-shirt"
IT'S the ideal Xmas gift for embittered dot-com wage-slaves, disgruntled ex-employees of overhyped new media start-ups, or pretty much anyone relishing the schadenfreude of all those companies that were clearly never really worth their vastly inflated share prices after all. It's the I got £80million in venture capital for my .com idea - and all I have left is this lousy T-shirt T-shirt - brought to you by once-credible new-media gossip website NTK, foolhardily leaping into the ailing e-commerce market at what, experts agree, is probably the worst time ever to do so.
In a sick travesty of the whole idea of an online "community", this design is the result of a year-long contest to get NTK readers to design their own merchandising, so that they can then have it sold back to them. The slogan is printed in a vaguely familiar-looking font on a faintly evocative orange background, and suffuses each shirt with the barely repressed self-loathing of every new media worker who has helped transform the world's most sophisticated communications network into a glorified shopping mall.
At least £1 from the sale of each "I got £80million..." shirt goes to the winning designer (an individual known only as "Bruce"), while NTK promises to invest any other profits in their continued attempts to subvert the internet industry in any way they can. NTK therefore advises potential purchasers to visit www.ntkmart.com as soon as possible, before some idiot genuinely does try to invest millions in the site, which - as is traditional in this business - we would then be obliged to fritter away on overpaid marketing consultants, unnavigable Flash interfaces, lame adverts on the sides of buses, and lunatic price-cutting on products that people never wanted to buy online in the first place.
- the sarcastic e-commerce site for the UK