So apparently PepsiCo, in an apparent attempt to leech reputation and gain blog traffic by proxy, has bought its way into
ScienceBlogs, where I spend a fair amount of time hanging out. I think this stinks for several reasons:
a) It seems like an attempt at greenwashing, like by blogging about food science and nutrition, PepsiCo is trying to make out that they're a "good corporate citizen"
1 in that they
care about nutrition and stopping the so-called obesity epidemic and so on and so forth. This strikes me as akin to Wal-Mart's
CF lightbulb initiative and their subsequent trumpeting of their environmental friendliness, 100 000 s.f. mega-box rainflow-distorting, hectares-of-land-buried-under-concrete, air-conditioned big box grotesqueries notwithstanding.
b) It seems as though PepsiCo is trying to grab reputation and traffic by proxy. ScienceBlogs itself is the biggest, most well-trafficked science blogging site on the whole Internet. It's the place to be to read interesting writing on science, as well as a variety of other topics including
religion or the lack of it,
medicine,
current events, and politics. It's a great place to be, and I can understand PepsiCo's PR department wanting to grab a piece of that shine for themselves. On the other hand, in terms of getting traffic for themselves, what, do they really think that the Pharynguloid Hordes or the Respectfully Insolent are going to storm their blog
en masse to do anything other than give them the
Sadly, No! snark and awe treatment? Either corporate drones are really stupid, or they just don't really
get this internet thingy, despite its being in its
second decade of wide popular currency...
c) That said, what the fuck is PepsiCo doing trying to buy its way into ScienceBlogs, anyway?! PepsiCo is a giant transnational corporation with more money than Croesus, King Midas, and Scrooge McDuck put together, so to speak. It can afford to put a blog on its own corporate site (or one of them), and apparently has already done so, but wants to "syndicate" the blog onto ScienceBlogs. Or it could create its very own "experiential marketing" site, at trivial expense to a corporation of that size, to put the blog and whatever other suit-approved content it wants to put there, without making the ScienceBloggers look like a bunch of shills for swill.
d) It's a huge conflict of interest. I don't want to read a blog on nutrition put out by PepsiCo (or Coca-Cola, or Archer-Daniels-Midland, or Monsanto, or McDonalds, or or or) any more than I want to read a blog on mass transit put out by General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler, or a blog on sustainable energy put out by BP or Shell or even Petro-Canada. They have no credibility on the subject at all because they're a corporation, which exists strictly to make money, and these particular corporations
make their money by selling people products and/or services that are antithetical to those topics. If you don't get why this could be a problem, picture a blog about steak written by PETA.
e) There's no delicate way to say this: Corporations lie. They lie and they lie and they lie and they lie some more. Whether it's
tobacco industry denialism and stonewalling, Wal-Mart lying about
the origins of its products and projecting a wholesome folksy image while
squeezing its suppliers to death and
mistreating its
workers in a
variety of
ways, or the industry-funded
bullshit and
propaganda that has been put out regarding
biofuels, or the
assisted demise of the
rail transit system in North America, or the various propaganda-fests documented in
Fast Food Nation, or the egregious abuses documented by J. Patrick Wright from John De Lorean's notes in
On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, or the outright
denials of any wrongdoing or liability by Curragh Resources
2 in the
Westray mine disaster, or even the existence of
birthstones, which seems to have been made up out of the whole cloth so that Tiffany's could sell more jewellery to credulous dupes; it's wise to assume that since corporations exist for no other purpose than to make money, if a corporation can make money by lying, it will. Therefore it's really only justified to assume,
prima facie that a corporation is lying. Or, as your mother used to say, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Also, given a) through e), yeah, let's just give a billion-dollar corporation
another platform on which to put its corporate message. It's not as though there aren't practically already billboards on the backs of people's eyelids, for fuck's sake.
3 So I think this is a dumb move by Seed Media, and will ultimately either corrode ScienceBlogs' credibility, or it will backfire on them when the blog sinks like a stone and the revenue goes away.
________________
1 I refer you to Murray Dobbin's book
The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen.
2 Note the line "the explosion was a terrible tragedy which could not have been foreseen"; this about an explosion in a notoriously gassy and
deadly coal seam, in a mine where
stonedusting was done intermittently if at all (the extent to which this is true is documented in the
Westray Inquiry transcripts), but
hoocuddanode?! Gassy, coal-dusty mines tend to blow up! I dunno about you, but I'm
damn tired of flacks using "Nobody could have foreseen..." as their all-purpose Get-Out-Of-Jail/Stupid/Trouble-Free Card,
especially when the thing they're feigning ignorance of is so transparently obvious the chorus of "WE DID, YOU FUCKING IDIOT!" should be deafening.
3 But, thanks to NAFTA et al,
corporations now have more rights than natural persons, so we're not actually allowed to have ad-free public or personal space anymore, in our brave new world of dutifully, humbly, and gratefully serving our corporate overlords.
