From the “this is real shady” department comes reports like this one that appear to bring to light Google’s Team Pixel program. Here’s how the program works:
A company or PR representative reaches out to you because you have an audience; they want to market and grow hype around their new phone/product (in this case, the Pixel 9 series); you need new, shiny things for your channel, so you bite their hand off, and a box of shiny new toys wings its way to your home or studio.
But then reality sets in, the reality of how the B2C reviews machine really works. In order to get early access to these phones, and future phones, you must adhere to an agreement.
And what does that agreement stipulate?
Simple: you have to be positive about the product or else you’re off the team, no more new, free Pixel phones for you. With this kind of threat, of course, most will bend the knee. But some haven’t and some have even outed #teampixel on X, shout-out to Mark’s Tech.
The Mark’s Tech is this guy who posted this to Twitter:
And this:
Now to be clear, this is being done by a PR company named 1000Heads. So there is the chance that Google was not even aware that this was going on. Though I seriously doubt that based on this:
I think this is called damage control.
Let me comment on this from the perspective of someone who does reviews. First of all I make it very clear here that I say what I want. And if a company doesn’t like that, fine. Go someplace else. I’m cool with that. Now the people from manufacturers and PR firms that I’ve dealt with over the years have never pulled a stunt like this on me. But at the same time, I go out of my way to avoid being put in a position where I might be incentivized to say nice things about a product. Because that’s simply not fair to my readership. That’s likely meant that the readership of this blog hasn’t grown as fast as it could have if I were less ethical. But I’m fine with that as I can sleep at night.
Any company that does anything as shady as this needs to be called out and held accountable. Because the products a company makes should sell the most and be the best because they are the best and people in the business of reviewing products agree of their own free will and not because they were incentivized to say nice things. Anything else is just wrong.
Related
This entry was posted on August 17, 2024 at 8:31 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Google Appears To Be Incentivizing Reviewers For Praise
From the “this is real shady” department comes reports like this one that appear to bring to light Google’s Team Pixel program. Here’s how the program works:
A company or PR representative reaches out to you because you have an audience; they want to market and grow hype around their new phone/product (in this case, the Pixel 9 series); you need new, shiny things for your channel, so you bite their hand off, and a box of shiny new toys wings its way to your home or studio.
But then reality sets in, the reality of how the B2C reviews machine really works. In order to get early access to these phones, and future phones, you must adhere to an agreement.
And what does that agreement stipulate?
Simple: you have to be positive about the product or else you’re off the team, no more new, free Pixel phones for you. With this kind of threat, of course, most will bend the knee. But some haven’t and some have even outed #teampixel on X, shout-out to Mark’s Tech.
The Mark’s Tech is this guy who posted this to Twitter:
And this:
Now to be clear, this is being done by a PR company named 1000Heads. So there is the chance that Google was not even aware that this was going on. Though I seriously doubt that based on this:
I think this is called damage control.
Let me comment on this from the perspective of someone who does reviews. First of all I make it very clear here that I say what I want. And if a company doesn’t like that, fine. Go someplace else. I’m cool with that. Now the people from manufacturers and PR firms that I’ve dealt with over the years have never pulled a stunt like this on me. But at the same time, I go out of my way to avoid being put in a position where I might be incentivized to say nice things about a product. Because that’s simply not fair to my readership. That’s likely meant that the readership of this blog hasn’t grown as fast as it could have if I were less ethical. But I’m fine with that as I can sleep at night.
Any company that does anything as shady as this needs to be called out and held accountable. Because the products a company makes should sell the most and be the best because they are the best and people in the business of reviewing products agree of their own free will and not because they were incentivized to say nice things. Anything else is just wrong.
Share this:
Like this:
Related
This entry was posted on August 17, 2024 at 8:31 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.