“Would you like to be considered for the AMD Advocacy Program?” Free HW available …
Would you like to be considered for the AMD advocacy program? This question greeted AMD fans who were asked to confirm their attendance at AMD Technograffiti which took place March 7th in Austin, Texas the night before SXSW Interactive Festival began.
What is the AMD Advocacy Program? This was answered by Robert, a self-identified AMD Radeon marketing guy at Reddit Hardware forums.
It certainly sounds innocent. However, we have watched AMD start down the slippery slope of Stealth Marketing to tech site forums using their own employees to shill for them without disclosing that they are employed by AMD. We covered this in our blog: AMD, Intel, Kingston, and Nvidia & Social Media. However, let’s now look closely at what AMD says about their Advocate program.
Q. What is the AMD Advocate program on the signup?
A. Members of the program will occasionally get the chance to take home an AMD product in exchange for giving the product some airtime on their blog, Twitter, or whatever. Essentially, we want to make reviewers out of ordinary people who will get a chance to spend some time with a CPU or a graphics card and the like. Honestly and openly share your thoughts, start a conversation, get people talking. That’s all we ask.
The people who are asked to sign up are already fans, attending AMD’s Technograffiti event. Here they are offered an AMD product in exchange for blogging about it, using twitter, or talking about it on other social media such as on a tech forum. We don’t see any requirement that these fans make clear to their readers that the hardware is in exchange for their advocacy. Let’s look at the dictionary definition of “advocate”:
Definition of ADVOCATE
1: one that pleads the cause of another; specifically : one that pleads the cause of another before a tribunal or judicial court2: one that defends or maintains a cause or proposal3: one that supports or promotes the interests of another
Examples of ADVOCATE
- a passionate advocate of civil rights
- She works as a consumer advocate.
- He has paid respectful attention to the home schooling movement by meeting with its advocates and endorsing their cause.
Essentially we see that AMD is moving beyond a “Focus Group” to an “Advocacy Program” where their fans are targeted with offers of free hardware to advocate AMD products. Unless the very strictest standards of transparancy and disclosure are enforced – something that AMD has failed to do with their own employees posting on tech site forums without disclosure – there is too much room for abuse.
Worst of all, this may backfire on AMD because it now casts doubts on anyone that is talking about their products. How does anyone know that any forum advice given about AMD hardware is not coming from those fans who receive free AMD hardware? They may now feel even more impelled to advocate for AMD – especially with the anonymity that a tech forum allows. This is not a good situation for the tech community and it is not good for AMD as it undermines trust, and especially trust in AMD. We ask that AMD please reconsider what damage their Advocacy program may do to our communities and to them.
A corporate image is priceless. We genuinely like AMD and their products and we have always evaluated and treated them fairly. We continue to invite their representatives to respond and we will be glad to publish it here.
We started out at ABT without relations to any company, and together with our members we have built it into a great site by hard work and by honest detailed reviews. We will not be beholden to any company just because we review their products. We encourage manufacturers representatives – AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcomm, Intel, Samsung, Kingston, LG, Sony, etc. – to ethically and professionally participate and all of them are invited to have their products openly reviewed, evaluated, reported on by ABT fairly.
Our ABT forums are also open to the best tech discussions found anywhere. We invite you to join our free and growing active community.
UPDATED March 11, 2013 at 9:15 PM PDT
We got a response from AMD as we had sent a link to Chris Hook in AMD Graphics this morning. Here is the complete email:
First let me introduce myself: My name is Robert, and I’m the product marketing manager for enthusiast graphics at AMD: desktop gaming GPUs, AMD CrossFire, and AMD Eyefinity.
I was reading around the Internet and saw that you’d posted an article regarding a comment I made in a Reddit thread concerning the AMD Advocacy Program. It seems I didn’t adequately capture what I intended, so I hope I can make myself more clear on email. J
The Advocacy Program is an extension of AMD’s preexisting New Product Review Program (NPRP), which sends hardware samples to established websites (like ABT) for the purposes of independent third-party analysis. We hope to make these same inroads with new communication channels, like bloggers, YouTube reviewers and Twitter users, all of whom provide a unique and knowledgeable perspective that could add to the audience of independent reviewers already looking at our products in traditional press outlets. There are dozens of users with extremely large networks, an interest in technology, and no mechanism by which they might have access to open and honestly review a product in the same way that you might be able to as an established journalist.
We demand complete transparency in disclosing product sources, which is an FCC requirement in the US, the jurisdiction of our corporation. That is the same standard to which we hold all reviewers, advocacy program or otherwise.
More personally, I have a zero-tolerance policy for shilling as a 10-year forum moderation vet at another hardware review site. I’ve disclosed my affiliation there. I also disclosed my affiliation on the Reddit thread, as you saw. And I haunt the Overclock.net forums where again my affiliation is public. And on Twitter, where my affiliation is again disclosed. The same is also true for Google+, and Facebook, and any other location in which I might make product recommendations.
I expect the same from everyone in our marketing departments, and so does our legal team. J
Thanks for your time,
Robert
Robert Hallock
Product Marketing Manager
AMD Radeon™ Graphics
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Of course, ABT emailed Robert back for clarification:
Hi Robert,
My name is Mark Poppin and I am the Editor-in-Chief for ABT. It is a pleasure to meet you. Yes, I published my blog yesterday and I sent it along to Chris Hook for comment this morning. Chris and I were in a dialog last year but he did not follow up.
ABT has been blacklisted by AMD and we no longer get AMD news nor
products to review for the sole reason that we published this blog last
year:
AMD, Intel, Kingston, and Nvidia & Social Media
http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=29278
There is absolutely no doubt that AMD/Edelman has shills active on AnandTech forums and they are not transparent. We already met David Makin years ago when he attempted to recruit our fledgling site as a flog site for AMD. He even got us an exclusive interview with your CMO at the time, Nigel Dessau, and I learned about AMD’s plan to target social media.
We turned him down as we were intent on building a proper tech site
and eventually we built good relations with AMD as a Media Partner since the HD 5000 series and continuing through the entire HD 6000 series. ABT reviews are among the most thorough anywhere; we have been recommended on AMD’s own blogs. We are the 2nd tech site in the world to implement frame time benching and we have a 30-game benchmark suite.
However, we were cut off by AMD beginning with the HD 7970 launch and have had almost no communication since.
In your reply, you appear to be telling me that you have a “advocacy” program that is clearly targeted to your existing fans and yet you are saying that there is no opportunity for abuse. Yet we already observe this abuse daily on many tech forums. You did mention,”blog, Twitter, or whatever”, which no doubt seems to include seeding hardware to alpha forum members.
If you like, I will be glad to publish your reply as an update on my
same blog. However, we will not back down from our claim of AMD’s
stealth marketing to the tech sites unless you can show otherwise.
Very best regards,
Mark Poppin
ABT Editor-in-Chief
And we got an email reply later last night from Robert:
I would certainly appreciate if you published my response on your blog,
so your readers have complete access to both sides of the story. AMD
controls 100% of the NPRP sampling internally, and it is our belief that the age of social media demands greater care than ever to be clear about the origins of a product and the nature of a review. For all parties involved in the NPRP process (including reviewers), it is no doubt an honor system, but we are extremely cautious in selecting product reviewers for the reasons you’ve cited, and of course federal disclosure requirements. As we move in to the digital age, we hope this model will be equally viable and honest for new media—we won’t do it if it isn’t.
Thanks again,
Robert
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