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Does the author have a bias? Certainly. Is this an advertisement? Ads are paid announcements. There was nothing noting it was paid for in any capacity. There'
by mfer 7y ago
Does the author have a bias? Certainly.
Is this an advertisement? Ads are paid announcements. There was nothing noting it was paid for in any capacity.
There's a difference between an ad and a bias. I find it useful to notice biases because we all have them. Ads are quite different.
- Gene_Parmesan 7y agoFirst, there can be a big power discrepancy in cases where free product is provided for review purposes. It's different if you are part of a traditional media outfit and have a significant, steady readership. But for someone like this, there can be a lot of pressure to give very favorable write-ups. Second, this wouldn't be the first time someone did a paid promotion without noting it was paid. I don't know anything about this guy, so I'm not accusing him of anything. I'm just saying it's naive to think that everyone is always highly committed to playing nice with the FTC rules. (See game streamers and their odd tendency to open tons of 'loot boxes' on stream & get significantly better results than expected.) Finally a lot of the copy reads like it's straight from a press release, with capitalized words and everything. Whether it's enough to constitute an ad in a regulatory sense, I don't know. But you can be advertised to without the source being a literal ad according to a legal definition.
- la_barba 7y agoWhats the point of muddying the waters without having verifiable facts? The thing with speculation is .. anyone can speculate, on anything, for any reason. That doesn't make it true. >I'm just saying it's naive to think that everyone is always highly committed to playing nice with the FTC rules. Who exactly said that?
- TeMPOraL 7y agoLook at the quote at the beginning of this thread. If it looks like an ad, if it reads unnaturally, like something no real person would say to convey a honest opinion, then it's most likely an ad.
- la_barba 7y agoI guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. It didn't read like an ad to me. It reads like someone who was excited to use a cool new product, and wrote about it on their own website.
- mfer 7y agoI read the post and it read fairly naturally to me. There are a wide variety of people out there who communicate differently. Given the date of the post, time to write it up, and time to take the pictures this phone is in the hands of something before the official release date. I read this like I read something from John Gruber about something Apple.
- criley2 7y agoHe received a device in exchange for his review, so yes he was paid.
- endorphone 7y agoApple doesn't give out devices (unlike a variety of other companies that do). They lend it for review or development purposes and then you return it. That's how they work. Of course that is still a gift of sorts given that it gives some people a headstart, but for some random photographer that doesn't seem to be selling anything or have ads...eh, it's kind of a not super big value. Further he never thanked Apple. He thanked a maker of a camera app for iOS. At most it seems to be an ad for a camera app, and they likely provided the device to him.
- m000 7y agoOk, it's not an ad. It's an advertorial. Happy now? And he's just beating the strawman with his review. - Did we need a "review" to learn that the new iPhone can shoot better pictures than previous iPhones? - Where are all the full-resolution pictures–especially from the night shots? Everything looks nice and sharp if you scale it to 750x560. Even for the single lens camera of my 3 years-old android. - Would it break Apple's heart to include a comparison of their "pro camera" with a real professional camera? Even a low-end one. And let's not stick with the payment thing. We have no way to verify whether or not he received or will receive compensation from Apple. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
- mcphage 7y ago> Would it break Apple's heart to include a comparison of their "pro camera" with a real professional camera? Even a low-end one. Why would they? That's not who they're competing against.
- m000 7y agoHell, photographers know that any iPhone can't compete a midrange camera. But Apple clearly wants the average person to believe that it can. Why else stick a "pro" description to your phone's camera? Of course they can't spell it clearly, because they will become a laughing stock. But they do imply it at every opportunity: "Pro camera system. We’ve three‑upped ourselves.", review by professional photographer etc. It would be fair game if they had a professional instagrammer review the new iPhone. Because that's the only kind of "professional" camerawork you can do with any phone.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoHe doesn't even compare it to non-Apple phone cameras. Only to previous generation Apple cameras. That's one tipoff that the article is a submarine.
- bduerst 7y agoPromoted content exists, where publishers accept money from companies to write articles promoting a good or service, to subsidize their revenue. Most of the time they do not disclose this.