How Tech Companies Manipulate the Media ft. MKBHD

tech companies have figured out how to squeeze the most positive favorable coverage out of youtubers and journalists and to be honest i think it's time you knew about it so i've been working with marquez mkphd to lay out the five key ways that these tech companies manipulate the media now one thing that seems to be increasing at an alarming rate is giveaways with the launch of reviews now don't get me wrong giveaways can be a great thing but companies have quickly realized that by partnering up with influencers like us to make giveaways as part of our review videos they can massively reduce the negativity surrounding their product you probably remember these nothing ear ones right well as part of their hype generation strategy they did exactly this they even asked me and it's tempting because like how often does a company say to you they're going to make you 100 custom versions of their product for you to give to your audience but then i really thought about it and i realized i've got no idea how these earphones sound i've not tested them yet but if i'm going to be giving away 100 pairs of them in my video i'm going to look like a right idiot if i then say i don't like them can you imagine don't buy these earphones they suck by the way i'm launching a massive giveaway of them please like share subscribe to enter like if i'm organizing a giveaway on my own terms that's fine but if a company is saying to me let us send you 50 or 100 units to give away as part of your review video immediately what they're trying to do with that is turn my organic content into a promotional video without needing to pay or write up contracts or even make it officially sponsored over to marquez for number two okay so the next version of this that i've seen is what i'll call the uh coming soon feature the feature that gets announced on stage and makes a lot of headlines and it gets people very excited and it's super impressive but it's it's not ready yet it's it's coming soon later but this thing was announced on stage and now you're holding it in your hand and it it's not here yet so you kind of just have to include maybe a sentence or two about it about what it's supposed to do so an example of this would be uh when the iphone 11 came out and that deep fusion feature was also announced on stage as one of the new camera features so every written review and every video review had something in there that was basically at this point a quote from apple about what apple said deep fusion would do but then it didn't come out for a while and then of course as you can imagine weeks later when it did show up it wasn't all that great it didn't make a huge difference but now all of those reviews you know the written reviews you can go back and add a couple sentences but the video reviews you can't really go back and change and those impressions of those quotes from apple are stuck in people's heads rather than what the feature actually was but it gets worse because number three is the absolute fiasco that is embargoes now an embargo is not in itself a bad thing it's just basically when a company says don't publish your videos before this particular time on this particular date that's why you see like 20 videos all at once when a product launches every reviewer has been given the same embargo time but a lot of the time companies abuse this system with something called a dual embargo they tell reviewers okay when we announce the product the only videos you can make are first impressions videos if you want to do any kind of in-depth coverage or any kind of comparison then you have to wait for the full embargo which is a week or two weeks later they come up with some sort of excuse like oh we need to issue an important software update in that one week period and they'll use this to give you a whole list of things that in your first video you just can't say or show this happens a lot and it's pretty clear why companies do it two embargoes basically forces the media to split what could have been one article or one video into two to give the company two separate waves of coverage one set when the product launches but then also one set a couple of weeks later which often just so happens to be when that product is coming up for pre-order but also b to make the launch coverage the videos that most people will actually watch artificially positive see the restrictions given to reviewers for their first videos they're often so tight that you can't really say what you actually think there was a recent launch where i was told the first impressions video must focus on the hands-on experience of the device no benchmarks no camera judgment no camera samples you're welcome to talk about the design and specifications design and specifications if that's what someone wants that's what ads are for people don't watch my videos to find out design specifications they want opinions they want judgment and companies know this they know that if they restrict reviewers from giving opinions then all they really can talk about are all the new features they've added which naturally gives the viewers the impression that this is a complete no-brainer product that has no negatives yeah you might remember this happening pretty recently and very clearly intentionally with the microsoft surface duo i mean this was one where obviously a lot of people were interested in it's this dual screen android phone collaboration between google and microsoft and yeah us reviewers all got two embargoes so when embargo number one hits you're allowed to show anything you want as much as you want as long as it's just the hardware you can't show the software it's it's not done yet or whatever it's not finished it's not ready so you're not allowed to turn it on in your first video but you can show as much hardware as you want they literally said that and some people actually repeated it including me in our videos we weren't allowed to turn it on on camera and so this was maybe the most obvious biggest red flag of all time because yeah of course the surface duo had some really nice hardware it had this super sleek thin beautiful design one of the best hinges i've ever seen and that stuff was all very broadly painted beautifully in this first impression and that's everyone's biggest impression but the second you turn it on you encounter a not great software experience and microsoft knew that and that's what eventually showed up or to give you another example the nothing ear ones again do you know how these guys had initially planned to do their launch two embargoes and if you wanted to release a video for the first embargo when everyone's gonna be paying attention you weren't allowed to talk about fit or sound let me get this very clear you want me to make a video about a pair of earphones without talking about how they feel or sound in the ears what do you expect me to do for 10 minutes start knitting hey guys this is my review of the nothing ear one they're really oh i quite like how they're what can i actually say i would have felt guilty posting a video with such little information on this channel but thankfully after we pushed back the company eventually did agree to change it to just one embargo where you could say everything so fair play to them for listening most companies don't but you know the biggest thing that annoys me about these embargoes is that companies only enforce them when it suits them so last year for the launch of the samsung galaxy note 20 ultra i was asked to travel to london in the middle of a pandemic to film a video in the company's shared space okay fine and then i spent a full week scripting that video to try and make the best possible most detailed piece of content i could and the second the phone launched i posted it i was so relieved the video was doing well only then the company emailed me to say take it down excuse me take the video down because it violates our first impressions embargo because you compared this phone to a different model we think this video counts as too in depth okay so what samsung's basically saying is that they deem any kind of comparison as too much information to give for your first impressions video fine but i'd made almost exactly the same comparison for their previous launch and presumably because that was a more positive video for that launch they didn't just not say anything but they actually actively reached out to me to ask if they could promote that video but also in all these phone launch presentations they are already making comparisons samsung had already told people that this new phone was like 20 faster than the last one and that the new camera had better autofocus and that the s pen was more responsive etc these are all inherently comparisons and so what they really meant was not no comparisons allowed in your first videos but in fact only the comparisons that we want to be allowed in your first videos and samsung are not the only company who do this yeah that sounds about right actually the point is dual embargoes are gross and they prevent journalists from doing their job all right so another one and this one's kind of interesting actually exclusives and interviews and things like that it's sort of along the same lines as companies trying to turn organic impressions and evaluation into promotion for free so you might have noticed on my channel we've done a fair amount of interviews and really fun sometimes even world exclusives that are amazing videos they make for a great experience both for the viewer and for myself but at some point uh the light bulb went off and people at these companies started to realize they could use these interviews as a sort of mask or just to use them to offset any negative pr they could use them in orchestration alongside a product launch to minimize negativity and so now these have become like a really interesting delicate dance to walk because companies will approach you with an interview they want to do i remember an example would be what oneplus did with the nord when they were first going to announce this super hyped ultra budget phone the oneplus nord oneplus came to me and said all right marquez we have a world exclusive we'll let you interview carl pay co-founder and you guys can talk all about this stuff and what they wanted was a you know let's talk about the history of oneplus and let's talk about why we're launching a new product line and this promo and that promo and this talking point and so behind the scenes i had to do a lot of twisting and a lot of messing with that plan in order to make a different video where it was still a fun exclusive interview but we got to talk about the actual process of making a budget phone in general we got real prices for different parts of a phone and how much they cost the manufacturer but that was a far twist from what they were planning on making which would have been an ad so this is the type of thing that's evolved a lot lately and we ended up still making something that was pretty great for the viewer and great to show people but it's definitely changing okay this one's really unfortunate i want to bring your attention to out of context quoting that's not right and if you are enjoying this video then a sub to the channel would be right when i make a review of a product i spend a long time crafting that script i tried to make a a really tight structured storyline that is meant to be watched from start to finish and i'd like to think that this makes them useful videos to engage with but it also means that if you just take one sentence out in isolation it is not at all going to summarize the subtlety of what i'm trying to say i'll give you an example late last year i made a full review about that galaxy note 20 ultra and i titled this video the perfect samsung and what i meant by that which i explained in the content itself was that this was a brilliant phone but it was let down by some of the fundamental problems that samsung phones in general have so i was kind of surprised to see that a week later this title was sitting on samsung's homepage the perfect samsung those are my words but when taken out of context they mean something different i spent a long time digging and as far as i can see they didn't tell me they were going to use that quote but even at the very least if they did i would have expected them to at least link the full video from there so people could understand what i meant by it nope and there's plenty of other examples of this one of the major ones being these mashup videos the 30 second or so quick fire cuts from various reviewers it's very clear why they make these videos they're short they're sharp and they leverage the trust that people have in these reviewers but they chop out all the caveats they'll cut videos mid-sentence to exclude any negatives any butts they might mention to make it seem like they've just created the perfect phone if you chop out the caveats you could make the red hydrogen one a phone that was universally regarded as a miserable fail seem like an incredible device look this is a mashup that i made myself for this phone that was reviewed as like a three out of ten in a best case scenario [Applause] the hydrogen one smartphone it's definitely one of the most unique looking phones of this year oh it's just so different it's built like an absolute tank but beyond that holographic display creates an experience beyond 3d things will sort of pop out of the screen and appear to fly at you kind of float above the display unlike any other phone selling today amazing speakers 4 500 milliamp hour battery so the biggest in any phone i've tested so far interchangeable lens mount smartphone form factor a holographic medium machine cameras you really can create something almost magical a photo that seems to jump off the screen i'm ready for this it is unique every time i pick it up i'm impressed all over again so yes you did hear that right i said snapdragon 835 that's why the performance and battery life are actually good the world never saw this coming red cares a lot [Music] now don't get me wrong companies do sometimes ask for permission before using our content like this they sometimes purchase licenses but they often don't and they never tell you that they're going to use it in a way that alters your message so they have it pre-launched giveaways features coming soon dual embargoes exclusives interviews and out of context quoting now you know thanks to marquez for hopping in on this one you can find his channel down below to find out if you can actually trust me click here or to see some of the cheapest wildest tech on the planet click here my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss i'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 6,212,334

Keywords: samsung, apple, xiaomi, tech companies, tech, big tech, scam, unboxing, review, mkbhd, marques brownlee, marques, brownlee, smartphone, gadget, biased, can you trust mkbhd, elon musk

Id: 9V0lXIK9DZQ

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/shinbreaker]

As someone in the media who works on a major site that does hardware reviews, this video really only pertains to Youtubers as they're far easier to manipulate than news organizations.

[u/Darius-was-the-goody]

Forgot to mention that if you don't agree to do the mostly positive "impressions video" They won't give you a pre-release phone for you to try out. So when the "review" embargo is lifted you won't have a review video ready. Whereas all the other youtubers that agreed to make the positive "impressions video" get the phone early so they can also make a review video.

Essentially, if you want to review their product you have to agree to chill it before you even get to know it.

[u/Potatolantern]

This mostly just pertains to Youtubers honestly.

And it's actually crazy to me just how openly and shamelessly Youtubers shill products these days. They do it in a way that'd make old school radio hosts blush, dedicating huge portions of their video to marketing the most absolute garbage. Hell, sometimes skit videos will make the highlight/punchline of every one of their skits just shilling a product.

[u/Timedoutsob]

this is why you shouldn't trust any ad from someone who has any financial incentive for their review, sponsor whatever. It's plainly obvious that people can not, in most cases, be totally objective when they have a financial incentive for what they are saying.

[u/geomachina]

They intentionally left out #6: For the people

Slightly going against the grain, but not really, to appear as if these YouTubers are calling out their own industry and the companies that they work with in order to gain the trust of their followers. It’s a design mechanism that breeds bandwagons or favoritism of one channel over another, so the YouTuber algorithm then pushes these channels higher up. That’s why you see MKBHD, LTT, Dave2D, PocketNow, etc. just jam pack your home page when they all use the first 5 tactics.

But don’t worry, they are telling us they are aware of these tactics. And they are manipulative! You can’t get away with this - Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Razer!!!!
Except, they’re still getting away with it but now they’ve got a different following. “I’m woke to the system!” following. All the other reviewers aren’t reviewers, they’re salesmen! MKBHD and Linus are the few that call them out!!!

This entire video was made to get more views and followers. It can’t be more obvious.

[u/cacoecacoe]

"How Youtubers keep the audience on side" - periodically release meta videos about how they're on our side and then go back to the usual.

[u/rumdiary]

You ought to see how the profit motive manipulates the media

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

TL;DR: media that makes big corps happy will eat proper media that report on big corps wrongdoing

[u/Timedoutsob]

Charelie Munger (words to the effect of) I've never read a business analysis from a marketing services company that didn't conclude that we need more marketing services

[u/Charming-Station]

I think a fairly basic course on marketing strategies would have helped these guys understand that they aren't describing anything new, these are tried and tested strategies.