My Phone Bias Part 2: It’s not about SLAMMING popular phones…

It’s worth checking in periodically. As my channel evolves and shifts over time, it seems some folks might miss what the goal is here.

To begin, I believe disclosing explicit bias is critical to fair reviewing. No human reviewer is a truly objective machine. There is no such thing as objectivity. Full stop.

I believe a review needs context. If we’re not sure where a reviewer is coming from, then we lack a critical perspective to understand why a reviewer might grade certain aspects of a phone the way they do.

I laid my cards on the table a couple years back, and I’m happy that basically everything I talked about in my “BIAS” video still pretty much holds true today.

Now you know where I’m coming from, and what I value.

Since then however, this conversation has grown more concerning. The issues I talk about at the tail end of that video seem to be getting worse, not better. Over 2019, a major focus for my channel has been to point out media literacy issues which I believe contribute to some disturbing trends in consumer electronics.

Today we find ourselves in a serious and unique situation. Gadgets and electronics are being stressed like never before. How someone spends their gadget money has never been more important.

I naturally have a bit of a contrarian streak, and I enjoy stirring the pot for fun debates. The goal of my channel has never been, and will never be, to trash popular devices simply because they are popular. I’m not praising “less popular” phones just to throw a thumb in the eye of the “cool kids”.

This needs a bit of explanation…

If you watched that BIAS video, my number one criteria for judging a product is to rate it against the manufacturer’s own claims.

I really need that to sink in.

What did the manufacturer say about the product? How did the manufacturer price the product opposite the competition? What are the claims?

Reviews don’t happen in a vacuum. No product exists simply to exist. A team of people crafted something to try and turn a profit, and the marketing folks on that team try to position it in the most positive light they can.

It’s no coincidence that in North America, the two companies that spend the most on advertising are the top two options purchased by consumers.

Over 2018 Samsung was the number one advertising spender in the world, across all industries and products. Samsung outspent the collected household brands of Proctor and Gamble, all of these products below.

I don’t know if Samsung will be the top advertiser in 2020, but they will likely remain one of the top ad buyers of the year.

Samsung makes great products, but the feeling that the brand is ubiquitous is not simple meritocracy. Roughly half of all Android phones sold in the USA are Samsung, but in light of the incredible marketing spends, we shouldn’t assume they “win” solely because the products are so much better than the competition. The Samsung label commands more of a premium, in part, to pay for those billion-dollar ad campaigns.

Marketing has a snowball effect.

This filters down to reviewers. If Samsung spends this much money on visibility for their products, a lot of that on digital advertising, the search visibility will already be higher on services like YouTube.

It’s simply more profitable to make videos for more popular topics. If you put the same amount of work into coverage on another device, you go into that coverage KNOWING it will make you less money. When those videos prove to be less popular than Apple or Samsung videos, YouTube “rewards” your channel with less recommendations and lower search results.

It helps to grade Samsung on a curve.

You know that more people are currently buying Samsung and THEN watching videos on the product they already bought. Samsung makes your job a little easier with outlandish advertiser spending. YouTube will pay you better for popular content, and will punish your channel if your metrics drop.

The channels who MIGHT spend time with an LG, Moto, Pixel, or Sony often aren’t reviewing those devices in earnest. Much less time is spent using those devices or tracking things like updates. There’s little or no feature focus or follow through on longer term coverage. Often, the “post embargo” verdicts seem less like reviews of the actual product. They often read more like confirmations for folks who bought more popular devices.

“Instead of trying to figure out who this phone might be perfect for, I’m going to tell you why you were right NOT to buy this phone!”

Back to our current social distancing experiment.

We’re watching a review trend where the most popular options have increased significantly in price, yet still command most of the attention. The review format hasn’t changed for many channels. What was right for a Galaxy S7 still seems to hold true for a Galaxy S20. We’re going to wince a little at the price, but we’re still mainly going to focus on the lowest common denominator “average consumer” use.

When a reviewer is not clear about their review goals, I worry that individual is more a media and marketing “entertainer” than an actual reviewer. $1000 and higher phones have no business being discussed as the “default” options for “average” consumers.

Consumers around the globe have figured this out. Mid-range phones grossly outsell premium devices. It’s the review space which still acts like “covering the basics” is reasonable commentary for phones that can easily break $1400.

It’s not JUST the dollars spent on advertising.

Tone matters.

Apple doesn’t spend a lot on advertising to say “It’s a pretty good phone”. They make bold claims, and represent their products in an aspirational light. They stage auditoriums with professional film makers and talk about “pro” use. They compare their products against competitors (with unlabeled bar graphs) while using superlative after superlative to instill an emotional connection to their brand.

None of my iPhone 11 Pro coverage was negative to the phone. None of it. In my camera review, I claimed it was the top auto mode option of 2019. Because it was.

It takes a special snowflake fanboy to make it to the end of my iPhone reviews, and claim I’m JUST slamming the phone to be a contrarian.

Tone matters.

To hear Apple describe their products, they are evolutionary jumps in performance representing an indomitable lead over the competition. If we’re only judging an $1100 64GB “pro” phone by how well it operates as an Auto-HDR camera, it is the best solution of last year. However, it does not live up to Apple’s marketing, and it does not represent any astonishing lead over competing products.

I will happily tell you the iPhone 11 Pro had the best overall auto shooter. I have to balance that against the incredible price tag, and the claims made by Apple PR.

If I stop at “best auto shooter”, I’m confident many people will be underwhelmed by their purchase when the phone isn’t magically different than previous iPhones or premium Androids. Especially for the price.

Samsung coverage is similar. Samsung doesn’t outspend the world’s largest home goods conglomerate to produce “Our phone is neat” commercials.

Samsung touts being able to “DO WHAT YOU CAN’T”. Their products will help you achieve the impossible.

Samsung phones are the phones that will CHANGE photography with a REVOLUTIONARY experience! It’s a MASSIVE leap forward! Game-changing! Those are all direct quotes from the Galaxy S20 website.

I’m not setting a high review bar for Samsung products. Samsung is setting the bar. Samsung regularly mocks the CUSTOMERS of Apple products in a “punch down” bullying kind of way, and then will copy Apple when it’s more profitable to remove features from their phones.

By comparison, LG’s tag line for the V60 is “Do More At Once”. For a phone with two displays, that’s just literally true. It’s not even “Do More Better”. There’s no bragging. LG’s marketing is setting a far lower bar for a phone that features some of the most radical differences in feature set opposite the competition. But I digress…

Like Apple, I see no evidence to suggest that Samsung’s current products represent any significant or radical improvement in modern phone design. They’re very good products, iterating on the features we’ve come to expect from premium phone manufacturers.

As such, I see no reason to talk about Samsung or Apple products with any reverence. They might be “popular”, but that doesn’t mean they get special treatment.

It’s interesting to see how upset YouTube commenters get when I refuse to act like Samsung or Apple products are inherently better. When I treat a Galaxy or an iPhone like any other product, and judge it by the same criteria, that somehow morphs into me “attacking” or “trashing” the people who bought those phones.

I AM criticizing billion dollar corporations. I am NOT criticizing consumers.

I can’t remember the last time I outright said “don’t buy this product”. I don’t believe I’ve ever explicitly told anyone how they SHOULD spend their money in one of my reviews. Even comparing pricing between different brands, I mostly highlight price tags when I think we see good competition.

With the exception of the Note 4, I can’t remember the last time I felt there was a runaway “winner” in the smartphone space at any price tier.

The difference between implicit and explicit bias.

I told you my bias. I told you what I prefer, and why I score some features the way I do. You are better prepared to follow my commentary. You can agree with or disregard any part of my review, with the specific perspective of where I’m coming from. You know the “why” of my reviews.

Spending as much time on Sony, LG, Blackberry, OnePlus, and the Pixel, as I do on Apple and Samsung, I think we can be fairly confident I’m NOT trying to maximize my YouTube ad revenue as well as I could be. There’s no step here where I profit more from this coverage, and it’s likely harming my YouTube metrics in the long run.

I TRY not to bend my opinions for brands I like, though that’s obviously never a perfect formula. Humans are emotional creatures. I can only assert that a LOT of thought goes into trying to balance those feelings against testing protocols I can reproduce.

If Phone A renders video slower than Phone B, there’s not much I can do to make Phone A look better if it’s a brand I personally enjoy.

It’s not difficult to dredge up videos I’ve produced from seven or eight years ago, to see me snarkily talk about the same issues which concern me today. If that’s not consistency, I’m not sure what is.

Tech is my hobby. My Love. My lifestyle. What I want most of all is vibrant competition. That’s the ONLY way our tech gets better.

If my opinions flowed with some other benefit in mind, I don’t think my channel would look like it does today…