The (Bad) People are Still Beating the Algorithms

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There is great consternation these days that computers are coming for our jobs. In the marketing world, for example, I have heard a lot of concern that creative and media buying are both under threat from AI/ML/algorithms (maybe this is all the same thing, or maybe people throw out terms without knowing exactly what they mean).

Based on what I am seeing online, however, it’s clear that the machines have not yet vanquished the humans, at least the unethical ones. I give you two examples.

SEO Pay to Play

First, Google SEO. An article on HouseFresh - a website dedicated entirely to product reviews of dehumidifiers and air purifiers (wow, talk about a narrow area of expertise) - does an amazing job of exposing the sloppy, affiliate-driven, and yet highly SERP ranked product reviews with which established magazine websites like Forbes and Better Homes and Gardens are ranking highly on Google.

The scam works like this:

Savvy SEOs at big media publishers (or third-party vendors hired by them) realized that they could create pages for ‘best of’ product recommendations without the need to invest any time or effort in actually testing and reviewing the products first.

So, they peppered their pages with references to a ‘rigorous testing process,’ their ‘lab team,’ subject matter experts ‘they collaborated with,’ and complicated methodologies that seem impressive at a cursory look.?

Sometimes, they even added photos of ‘tests’ with products covered in Post-it notes, someone holding a tape measure, and people with very ‘scientific’ clipboards.?

The article then discusses Better Homes and Gardens top pick, the Molekule AIr Mini Plus: “We have no idea how this device made the list considering that Molekule recently filed for bankruptcy, has active class action lawsuits for false advertising, has been recognized by Wirecutter as the worst air purifier they tested, and received the honor of being labeled as “not living up to the hype” by Consumer Reports.”

The answer, of course, is that Molekule is paying the highest affiliate commission to BH&G!

There are other amazing revelations in the piece. For example, the owner of BH&G - Dot Dash Meredith - also owns other big name sites and it just so happens that the same reviewers and same photographers end up ranking the same products number one of those sites as well.

The bottom line is that either SEOs are completely out-maneuvering Google’s natural search algorithm, or Google just doesn’t care, or both. Score one point for the humans (but maybe subtract a point for all the humans getting scammed by these fake product rankings).

Super Mario Razors

Second, Amazon. I recently read a Harvard Business Review case study that gushed about Amazon’s “obsession” with customer satisfaction: “there was no doubt that customer obsession was the “first leadership principle.” During his weekly check-in with executives, Bezos always asked what could Amazon do better for customers, even going as far as to have an empty chair during some meetings to represent the absent customer.”

Amazon does a lot of customer-centric things (first and foremost, I would argue, is fast, reliable delivery). At the same time, Amazon has also allowed (or been unable to stop) aggressive marketers from gaming the system, to the detriment of user experience.

The most egregious example of such behavior is “bait and switch” listings. It works like this: a company has a new product they want to sell on Amazon, but without a lot of positive product reviews, they are worried that they will never get any traction on the site. So, they buy a listing of another product (usually totally unrelated) that has a lot of positive reviews. They then replace that product with their product and - voila - they have a highly reviewed product live on Amazon.

Recently, I was searching for a razor and I noticed that all the reviews were for Super Mario Brothers toys. A few years back, a dog collar search led me to a product with reviews for a tea infuser (maybe it soothed the dog?).

Less outrageous are the fake reviews that flood Amazon. The good news is that these reviews are for the actual product listed, not the dog collar to tea infuser scam. The bad news is that they are fake. In many cases the reviewer buys the product, thereby becoming a “verified purchaser”, writes a glowing review, and then gets reimbursed for the product or paid cash offline by the manufacturer.

The end result is a bad customer experience. More and more, savvy shoppers on Amazon automatically default to the one and two star reviews to see what real shoppers say about a product. And it’s yet another example of how machines have yet to figure out how to stop clever humans from gaming the system.

Bagels and Bots

Noah Alper, founder of Noah’s Bagels, writes in his book The Business Mensch about how he did extensive testing to uncover why bagels in New York City tasted better than anywhere else in the world. He tested the pH balance of the water - it was normal. He looked at ingredients - they were nothing special.?

So what made the bagels so delicious? Competition. Noah found that every bagel store in New York had to always be on top of their game. For example, they would alter the cooking time of their bagels based on the height of their ceilings (low ceilings would push the steam down, increasing the temperature and thus decreasing cooking time). A bagel store that didn’t make perfect bagels wouldn’t last.

At the end of the day, Google and Amazon are making truckloads of money and there really aren’t viable alternatives for consumers. Until ChatGPT takes away serious market share from Google, or Walmart or Temu stop Amazon’s rise, these giants of industry are willing to let the humans keep winning, even if those victories aren’t exactly in the best interest of us other humans who shop online!

(hat tip to Caitlin Halpert for recommending the article from HouseFresh!