12mo ago

Google threatened tech influencers unless they ‘preferred’ the Pixel

www.theverge.com

34 comments

This was just incredibly dumb. Now any positive news about their new phone is going to be seen as planted.
- I always assume that anyway
- They don’t care, the massive majority of normies will never hear about it and those that do won’t care
  
  Normies buy Redmi Note Pro Max + (or iPhone if they're rich). Pixel is for devs and photos.
Influencer is a fancy word for salesman. Instead of going door to door like grandpa did in the old days, they stream directly to your device.
- influencers used to be called attention whores but you can't really use that term if you want to shill products
  
  Yeah that's kinda my whole disconnect from this stuff from the get go. These guys were begging for attention! Huge turn off
So these influencers are against this type of practice? That means they all really do play Raid:Shadow legends.
- There's a big difference between being sponsored by the very product you are reviewing in this specific video, and being sponsored by something unrelated while being openly and obviously presented as sponsored content.
This is for "brand ambassadors" says LTT (WAN show).
I don't see what's the problem. It's a proposal of a sponsorship with payment in nature (the expensive phones) instead of money. If the influencer disagrees, there's no problem and they can buy the phones by themselves, Google is not forced by law to send free phones to influencers.
I don't think that all those influencers are actually playing raid shadow legends or eating factor or using betterhelp.
Google is giving free review samples to real reviewers
- The first problem is that Google is giving an incentive to influencers - who are supposed to be (more or less) impartia - to review their phone favourably compared to alternatives.
  The second problem is that, despite being one of the biggest companies in the world, they did this in the most obvious way possible. Now who will trust any positive review of their phone? Anyone with common sense, let alone the lawyers whom I suppose cleared this - should have told them not to do something so dumb.
  Edit: corrected reviewers to influencers, for the reasons explained below.
  
  There are YouTube channels/instagrammers that exclusively review sponsored products. Bigger ones like Unbox therapy, LTT shortcircuit, and so on. Never a bad word about the shitty product they're reviewing, because it's a paid ad.
  Take a look by yourself. The product they're "reviewing" is clearly non functioning e-waste, yet they don't say it to make the advertiser happy.
  This is a program dedicated to influencers, not reviewers. The verge, Engadget, marques, Mr mobile, they didn't sign this contract. If Google believes that the outlet is legit, they give the review device for free without the sponsorship contract.
  Edit for clarity as I didn't add a paragraph between this sentence:
  When the influencer that got the free phone under this ad campaign shows the phone on camera they need to flag the post with #giftfromgoogle and #teampixel - you can use that as a hint that the review is biased
- Found the Google employee
- Advertisements should be explicit. You'll often see sponsored segments of videos when a YouTuber is talking about a product, where they explicitly say it's sponsored. These influences are being asked to treat the product preferential to other devices without being a sponsor.
  Advertising is one thing. Asking people to advertise your product without revealing that it's an ad is something else.
We don't call it fake news for no reason... These media whores ways been shilling whoever pays them and mega corps pays.
For those considering to buy a Google product, remember project Nimbus.

34 comments