How the Food Industry Pays Influencers to Shill Blueberries, Butter, and More
bonappetit.com
bonappetit.com
Likewise with coconut water, a habit I developed in Thailand.
If they're shilled, so be it. It works for me, and if it works for others, that's good, right?
It's very good. But it probably also has added sugar.
As you’re pointing out, it’s not always evil to be told about something you like.
Which is why it's so important for it to be as transparent as possible.
Marketers can't brag about being able to brainwash people and then get mad when people take offence to it.
It's one thing to be "told about something you like" and another to be manipulated even if sometimes it ultimately leads to a good outcome. If I trick you into buying something you wouldn't have bought otherwise it doesn't really matter much if it turns out later that you actually like the thing you overpaid for, I'd still be a dick.
For a while, I was saving the leftover from my morning coffee pot for a friend of mine, who used it to acidify the soil around her blueberry bushes. I don't know if it worked or not.
I've never felt anything despite hoping for some benefits from them, I wonder if I'm not eating enough of it.
Maybe it's placebo, I don't know. But I had occasional stomach issues which seemed to have gone away once I started consuming berries.
Now I assume everything is marketing by default. A couple that come to mind:
the ugly sonic design when the movie came out. You get a whole wave of promotion from the outrage, then another when the design is fixed.
An innocuous "my girlfriend's shirt matched her coffee mug" post but there are some brand name cookies in the edge of the frame.
If I worked in marketing, these are the sorts of things I'd be trying to come up with. It gets even more fun when you apply these concepts to political propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_clown_sightings
then suddenly, what comes out the next year? A long awaited remake of It
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(2017_film)
well, that's awfully curious.
I can’t think of any situation where a marketer would be given enough agency to manufacture disaster in order to sell something, except in politics. However, they certainly do have the ability to manipulate the media and narratives.
I seriously doubt the sonic thing was a conspiracy as they put a ton of effort into making sonic and animating it, which they would have avoided if they intended to withdraw it.
My theory is not that it was marketing, but that the horrifying design was an order from above, and the trailer was a maneuver to create blowback against the design.
This is baseless, of course.
I don't know that this is happening, of course. Would love to have insight into it, but articles like this certainly strengthen my belief that it is happening.
but also keep in mind it's a startup-focused new aggregator and is explicitly for pushing your new product, esp. the YC ones.
it's a concession you have to make to use the site regularly, and I can live with that.
If you are going to be shilling for the vegan processed food industry, at least use oat milk (which you can make at home) or soy milk (which is actually delicious - at least the processed versions I had in Japan).
Thankfully most vendors or their marketing agency affiliates that engage in this sort of thing aren't particularly clever about it, so identification of puppet accounts to ban isn't too difficult.
for example, right here on HN was a buncha posts about Moka pots. the coffee pot, that is.
also started popping on lemmy and reddit. then gone. haven't seen much discussion before, or since.
I own a couple of said pots and noticed the uptick since I'm a fan, but the suddenness of it was a surprise, and points to marketing efforts.
Remember: pretty much everything you see is in service of someone's business model.
If it’s not bought from the side of the road in northern Ontario or Quebec (and probably some other places), you don’t know what you’re missing.
Something to do with the commercial varieties being selected for transport and size/color rather than flavor. Also I believe the commercial fruits are picked as soon as they seem ripe, while I can wait longer for them to get sweeter and I don't have to care about transportation spoiling the fruit.
Maybe blueberries are an exception to this trend, but I doubt it. I'm 100% willing to believe that they are way better if you grow them yourself or get them from some farmer who grew them himself.
We had a blueberry farm less than 5 miles from our house. My family just raves about how good the fresh blueberries are.
Crunchy water. They all taste like crunchy water. I wonder what's wrong with my taste capacity that there is an absolute absence of detection of blueberry.
On the grocery-destined side, there’s probably an aspect of strain selection and farming practices that focuses on bulk without regard to flavour+texture.
I think it's this and the gatekeeping in general.
> Store bought blueberries are garbage.
They're obviously not garbage and some people don't have access to fresh Blueberries.
Strawberries are the same thing, like I mentioned in my post. I encourage everyone to go pick strawberries at least once in their life. I like strawberries well enough normally. When you get them fully ripe, fresh from the plant, they are heavenly. It's something everyone should experience.
In reality, good business is all about win-win or win-win-win.
The blueberry producer won. The person who did the ad won. And the consumer won, because blueberries are healthier for you than like 90% of other food choices.
There's no practical difference between being 'manipulated' and showing you a reasonable argument for adopting a healthier diet.
Just try things people. Blueberries are awesome. I know a lot of yall sit at a desk and work on a computer. I personally find blueberries to be an amazing snack and fuel for that kind of work.
Driscoll Berries - thumbs down
Twin Rivers - thumbs up
Farmers market - thumbs up
what if I want a different berry?! No answer to that I assume /s
Any company that makes butter as good as the below [1], and has an idea that some people haven’t heard of it.
It’s silly expensive. It’s so great.
https://www.lewisroadcreamery.com/collections/grass-fed-butt...
https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/research-promotio...
Perhaps you’re referring to this case [1], which Oprah won?
[1] https://www.britannica.com/story/a-brief-history-of-food-lib...
So while you're right it sucks and it's bad that they can do this, it's not specifically a "big hamburger" problem.
Apparently the polyphenol oxidase in bananas doesn't play well with other nutrients.
Personally my long term dietary choices have been guided by N=1 experiments on myself, a.k.a. anecdotes, that have proven to be life saving for me. Anecdotes from others are useful for suggesting such experiments on myself, in the same way that epidemiological studies are useful for suggesting RCTs.
That said, I'm a fan of processing as little as possible, and I imagine a fruit salad of those two things would still suffer from this effect just as the smoothie, but surely not to the same magnitude, there's just bound to be less total mixing.
The bigger hedge is just to have a varied diet.
All in all though it seems an oddly medium-low importance thing to bring up in context?
If you care about it, it's worth mentioning.
Especially since the proposed fix is simple: eat high PPO foods (which themselves may be beneficial) at different times than foods heavy in nutrients they impact.
(I didn't even read the article)
I have nothing against paid promotion whether for butter, blueberries or cigarettes, but it should be made clear who is promoting it.
I doubt it's a new phenomenon -- presumably in the past people bought sneakers because some celebrity wore them or recommended them. But it's probably more ubiquitous? And I think it's easier to fool yourself you have a relationship or kinship with a Instagram microcelebrity than with Micheal Jordan.
That, and it's probably easier to be fooled into thinking some Instagram microcelebrity is expressing a true independent opinion rather than making a paid endorsement.
I think a similar thing happened to blogs. I recall reading years ago about a "mattress blog" that presented itself as some enthusiast sharing his knowledge, but it was 100% pay-for-play promotion. I'm not super active on social media, but I'm assuming something similar is going on there with influencers.
An additional insidious dynamic is how advertising camouflages itself in whatever medium is the popular way for people to share honest opinions with strangers, then infects it so totally that you can't really trust it anymore. It's really undermined one of the positive selling points of the web.
Ancient Romans bought specific brands because gladiators advertised it, and their most parasocially attached fans bought their bottled sweat as perfume.
So it's been around for as about as long as true commercial enterprises in the "modern" sense have been around.
> But it's probably more ubiquitous?
I think it's far more obvious today, because it's so hyper focused and fractured and short lived today that these phenomena are no longer society wide, decade long "fashion trends". In the era of mass media, everyone got influenced by the same handful of celebrities and wasn't really aware of what was happening since everyone did it roughly at the same time, now you have thousands of bubbles forming around thousands of micro-celebrities, and everyone thinks what people in the other bubbles are doing is weird.
Pharmaceutical companies have paid doctors (in hotels, spas and what not) to prescribe their pipeline medications to patients. Then US government passed a law to make it illegal for pharmas to do that. It just spawned some 'medical education' company that is hired by the big pharams to do it on their behave.
Consumer capitalism is kinda like democracy. The consumer/voter need to be well informed/educated, and information needs to be 100% transparent.
"…I do worship celebrities, because they’re very powerful, their moods create weather. I was feeling bad about it, and then I was like, “Well of course, I’m just a tiny, frightened animal. I’m gonna look towards the most powerful and fertile-appearing of our species for information on how to survive. I need to find out what that Jennifer Aniston is doing. She’s a strong, sexy monkey. She’s going to tell us where all the bananas are located.”
1. Convince people they're part of your group, make them feel special for being part of that group, and make yourself their identity.
2. Don't straight-up recommend the product. Say things similar to "This is great for people like us!" Insinuate that people truly in the group would want this product (and therefore, wanting this product makes you part of the group).
3. Profit.
Identity / group appeals are more powerful than individual ones. Unless you're Michael Jordan.
He did this with smoking for women.
- Company A wants to sell more cigarettes.
- Company A approaches marketing firm B to sell things.
- Marketing firm B hires marketing firm C and D talk about how cool it is to smoke for women. Show women smoking in cool ways. Show doctors are cool with it. Show how empowered you are. Very base emotional in-group ideas and feeling good about yourself (not necessarily good for you). Do this until a particular point in time when people seem to be buzzing about it and meme's fly. Social media has made this way easier and faster to do.
- Marketing firm B now starts putting brand A in adverts also espousing how they can help you with what firms C and D did.
- Profit for company A.
It is a shockingly effective way to manipulate people without them even seeing it. As it uses our cognitive biases to manipulate us. You think you can ignore but you will have a tough time of it. Even if someone shows you how it is working it can be tough to get out of it. As you had 3 other people tell you it is ok and several trusted 'news like' sources say it is ok. It is also used in political orgs to good effect too. This method is everywhere.
> If you think you aren't influenced by "thought leaders" and similar, you are mistaken.
That seems like a false equivalence. I think the question is about what kind of influence, not "influence, y/n?" Is it typical for "thought leaders" to be paid to dishonestly push certain ideas?
My understanding is "thought leaders" are at worst self-promoters and at best are just people with ideas they believe in. "[Social media] influencers" on the other hand, are typically paid shills.
Null hypothesis would imply we should treat them no different than other influencers. Unless you've evidence otherwise?
So what exactly is your definition of a "thought leader?" How do you treat them "no different than other influencers" without closing yourself off to current ideas?
IMHO, social media "influencers" should be totally ignored, but the people active in public life should be engaged with, if skeptically.
There's no general reason I should inherently trust these people aren't being biased by third parties.
"X paid me to promote Y"
"My employer, X, doesn't mind if I write about Y on company time"
"Our socioeconomic system X happens to mean I have way more free time and energy to promote on of its bases, Y, than other people do"
but is it a qualitative slope or just quantitative?
I've never been willing to say/write something I believed to be manifestly untrue just because an employer wanted me too. But I've certainly avoided certain topics that I might have been willing to address more candidly under different circumstances.
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The idea that some evil influencer sect are inappropriately schilling blueberries is one of the most perverse counter tactics I can possibly imagine by said industry.