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FTC: Machinima Took Secret Cash To Shill Xbox One
jfruh writes: The Machinima gaming video network took money from a marketing agency hired by Microsoft to pay "influencers" up to $45,000 to promote the Xbox One. Crucially, the video endorsers did not disclose that they'd been paid, which has caused trouble with the FTC. For its part, Machinima notes that this happened in 2013, when the current management was not in charge.
Just a reminder: Machinima is not a "youtuber". It's a professional gaming publication with accreditations to major industry events (like E3) and 15 years of experience, and that's merely using youtube to deliver their own content, including reviews, previews and yes, "native ads". So before any professional publication takes the distance from Machinima just remember that most of any other major gaming site or gaming journalist is or has been in the past guilty of doing the same things.
1. Not surprised
2. How many other marketing agencies are getting away with it?
Seriously, the past couple years it has reached the point where I'm questioning if half the things I'm reading online are even genuine, or just shilled marketing from some PR team to push an agenda or product. It's happened on imgur, on reddit, even 4chan. Nevermind the gawker media rags, gaming media, and even mainstream media. I wouldn't even be surprised if it has happened here. We've all probably seen it - these people we've never heard of who suddenly get mass exposure for no reason, or things that nobody would've given two shits about, but every network carries the story. (Hurr, is the dress black and blue or white and gold!?!)
It's like mass advertising has become mass propaganda, and there's nowhere you can go to escape it.
Remember everyone: #GamerGate is about harassing women and excluding minorities from gaming. It's absolutely not about ethics in gaming journalism and "pay for play" coverage, which never happens.
This message brought to you by gaming journalism.
1) Deepfreeze.it: http://www.deepfreeze.it/ does a great job of digging into and revealing the ties, 'backscratching' and outright corruption behind most of the gaming journalists on the big sites.
2) http://www.gamespot.com/forums... or at least the general question: "Gaming 'journalist' - seriously? It's a multibillion-dollar industry, and yet most of the "journalists" are freaks sitting in mom's basement desperately trying to pretend they're the next Perez Hilton, and who are tickled if someone even mentions they exist. None of them have the credibility of even the shammiest movie review shill.
-Styopa
But that was disclosed. It's okay to be a paid shill if you tell people you're a paid shill.
I work in bank robbing, and I have robbed banks many times. The most effective bank robberies are the ones where you don't run in and scream "This is a bank robbery!". I don't see a problem with this, it's way more common than you think.
But, sirs, that was YEARS ago--way back in the 2013 era. You can't hold us responsible for what happened in the long-long-ago!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Well, the problem with that approach is it delivers a death blow to market-based and libertarian ideas.
This doesn't worry me personally that much, but I do understand there's a lot of people who get cognitive dissonance off such a conclusion. Here's why we can't have both this and a 'market' or 'freedom'; basing things off people individual decisions means those decisions have to be legitimate.
If the rule is that you're lied to and tricked, no person can devote the amount of time and energy needed to unearth the truth against the continuing efforts of entire organizations to conceal it.
If that occurs in EVERY AREA OF LIFE then you have to triage, and you're working far too hard to test that your drinking water isn't poisoned to give much of a crap about gaming journalism. Generally food-related and immediate-safety-related things will pre-empt everything else, and you'll feel pretty embattled as a general thing. Everything else in life, you're fair game as you just don't have the bandwidth.
If there are no consequences to extensive conning, it becomes completely impossible for a market-based system to cope with it as the gains are way out of proportion to the losses. It becomes impossible to compete honestly for a large share (I think it's possible to deal honestly and get a marginal, niche share on specifically that as a positioning statement, but I also think it locks you out of any significant market share which kills your ability to access capital)
People's attention is not detailed enough to support a full range of honest products in a world of lies. For instance, I support Jim Sterling's patreon. Are there other Jim Sterlings? There might be but I'll never know about it, so Jim ends up holding 90% of that 'market' through having been that person consistently for many years, and building a huge catalog of works as that. Effectively, you can't jump in and do what Jim does because there's already a Jim, and the world is big enough to support one Jim.
Now if the world was NOT FULL OF LIES, you could hear about things and not have to check up on them and you'd not get burned or lied to. In that way a market economy could arise where people sought out goods and services based on what they heard about 'em and what the marketing information told them. The information would be correct and trustworthy, allowing for stratification of a market into categories where stuff balanced out depending on how it was sort of minmaxed. And it'd be clear no product could promise everything, because that'd be dishonest: everything has its downside and that'd be clear too.
We don't have that.
We have gaming journalism, writ large. And that's why this matters.
So if the management changes, the current management is not responsible for anything.
I'm not sure the judges will agree with that.
Why not? I could care less either way, but would YOU like to get hung for your predecessor's mis-deeds?? Wouldn't be fair to you, now would it....
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Why not?
Because that would allow companies to get out of any liability for illegal or negligent activity by simply shifting around their management structure regularly.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I work in marketing, and have paid for "advertorials" many times. The most effective ads are ones not marked as advertisements. I don't see any problem with this
Well, it isn't a problem if you're a marketer. It is, however, a BIG problem if you're a consumer who's being lied to.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
So if the management changes, the current management is not responsible for anything.
Of course, that was WAY back in 2013, when Allen DeBevoise was the CEO of the company. Now he's just the Chairman of our Board of Directors.
Lol, I'm not even joking.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I work in marketing, and have paid for "advertorials" many times. The most effective ads are ones not marked as advertisements. I don't see any problem with this, it's way more common than you think.
Now you see, that's because you're an abominable monster. Humans have this mental construct called a "sense of honesty" which makes them feel offense at this kind of activity.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I work in murdering people, and have paid for "executions" many times. The most effective executions are ones not marked as executions. I don't see any problem with this, it's way more common than you think.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Good news: The Board of Directors doesn't shift very often (if at all - it's kind of glacial at best), and those members are usually among those in the dock when a company is accused of something bad.
Either way, the current management will eat the FTC fines (if any), and if the activity was criminal, I'm pretty sure the authorities can locate and drag in the former CxO's for the time period in question... while fining the current company if there are financial repercussions.
So no, it's not as if a company can get out of something by shuffling the business card titles.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Since i can't tell if the parent is being sarcastic or doubly sarcastic, i'll say this.
If GG had only focused on issues like this, i for one would be cheering them on. But GG didn't come into existence when, for example, Jeff Gerstmann was fired under pressure from a game developer whose game he reviewed poorly, way back in 2007.
They didn't erupt into fury until an indie female developer had sex with a journalist who never even reviewed her game. _That_ was the ethical violation so shocking that it demanded the creation of a movement. And then followed up by throwing a hissy-fit about Sarkesion's and Wu's op-ed pieces. And because there was no rational reason for the level of objections they were raising they resorted to misogynistic threats and insults of anyone who disagreed with them.
So now actual violations of ethics in game journalism are being overshadowed by the group that's using ethics as a flag to wave over their apparent rage that women are involved in gaming and have opinions about it. Claiming to be concerned about "ethics" while focusing almost exclusively on categories of people you dislike is like saying "think of the children" while drafting laws to enable spying on and imprisonment of the kinds of people you dislike.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Either way, the current management will eat the FTC fines (if any), and if the activity was criminal, I'm pretty sure the authorities can locate and drag in the former CxO's for the time period in question
Well, they won't have to look very far, at least. Machinima's CEO from 2013 is currently the Chairman of their Board of Directors. As soon as the heat came down, he resigned as CEO, became Chairman, appointed his own CEO successor, and hoped no would would notice the shell game.
Yes, because the FTC now trumps the right to free speech. Everyone is a drooling idiot and needs to be protected from big bad corporations. Don't like em, turn em off.
Well, as corporate officers, they'd have to fight the charges, or somehow deal with them, but this isn't about the new leaders, it is about the company. If you fire the CEO of a car company when it is found that their cars all explode into a giant fireball at 6,000 miles, the corporation is still responsible and the new CEO has to deal with leading the corporation through that. I don't think anyone blames the new CEO for the problem, though (unless he was a member of the executive team during past misdeeds).