An Intrepid Quest Through Fraudulent Medical Licenses and Pillow Reviews
Seeing Like An Affiliate Marketer Part 5
This blog was going to be about expertise, or the idea of expertise, and its specific relationship to affiliate marketing. I have covered already how The Stategist, Vox Media’s affiliate marketing arm, relies on expert witnesses when writing celebrity shopping articles. It’s Neil Gaiman’s expertise in writing that helps The Strategist to sell its partners’ notebooks: if a Leuchtterm notebook works for the writer of American Gods, surely it will work for you.
The Strategist bases its entire brand on expertise. It’s in the name—shopping, our personal forever war, requires strategy, and The Strategist will serve as our Bonaparte and Khan. It’s also the basis for its popular “Recommended By Experts” series, where The Strategist drafts doctors to recommend ergonomic office chairs and bartenders to review cocktail glasses. This reliance on experts at first seems to the benefit of The Strategist and its readers. Affiliate marketing arms of major media conglomerates aspire to be objective and journalistic, and to opine on topics as varied as the writing life and Italian cooking. The Strategist, like all journalism, will need to rely on credible sources. Shopping is a war with many fronts, and The Strategist’s claim to journalism is to conduct reconnaissance in the field by interviewing experts.
So, we have a straightforward post, right? I thought I would read about these products recommended by experts and then more richly understand how affiliate marketers write about such a vast array of industries, and by extension how our media ecosystem and modern consumerist world treats the idea of expertise. Expertise has always allured. In the world of advertising, 4 out of 5 dentists sold the world sugarless gum. In politics, liberals lionize wonks while conservatives appeal to the authority of “basic economics” (often, disproved economics) to justify hurting the poor. Maybe, I thought, I could see like an affiliate marketer, see like the embodiment of consumerist thought, and figure out why we believe in, weaponize, and build personality cults around expertise, why we believe in the need to consult experts when doing something as low-stake as buying marinara sauce.
That is, until I saw the “experts” which The Strategist had drafted. Simply put, a number of experts enlisted by The Strategist are scammers and grifters at best, and if there’s any topic I enjoy talking about more than consumption, it’s scams (be it GameStop meme stonks or Steam store liars).
Here’s the story of how The Strategist relied on an Australian with a fake medical credential to sell pillows.
What constitutes an expert to an affiliate marketer? Sometimes it’s doctors and yoga instructors, but almost as often it’s other marketers.
When reviewing down pillows, for example, they lean on the expertise of Laura Bates from Comfybeddy.com. Comfybeddy.com is an Australian affiliate marketing website focused on bedding. These narrowly-focused affiliate marketing blogs supply many of The Strategist’s experts. One would think that drafting in outside experts would be how The Strategist defends itself against the claim that they are merely marketers trying to sell products. Like the 4 out of 5 dentists, their experts would elevate their articles from mere advertisements to objective science. Yet, their expert on down pillows is in the same line of business as them, is herself an advertiser. She sells Australians down pillows. Advertisers dressed as experts is a pattern in The Strategist’s “Recommended By Experts” series. To sell readers Android tablets, they bring in the owner of TekClue and a reviewer from What in Tech, both small affiliate marketing publications with the same advertising ties as The Strategist. To sell MicroSD cards, The Strategist enlists the help of Seth Miranda from Adorama TV, the YouTube advertising arm of Adorama, a camera retailer with a wide offering of SD cards. Adorama employees often appear in The Strategist—here they are selling cameras, and in another article on SD cards Miranda makes an encore appearance.
This suggests that expertise at The Strategist was always just for show. The famous 4 out of 5 dentists study was, after all, itself a statistical fabrication. The Strategist doesn’t need to find experts. It simply has to convince its readership that it has found experts, and if their readers lack the media literacy skills or the will to follow up on the sources, then The Strategist can fill its roster of experts without much regard to expertise.
Yes, The Strategist does cite actual doctors and photographers in some of these articles. They are not totally devoid of credible sources. But, one bad apple, when it comes to credibility, does spoil the bunch. A reader cannot take any of this expertise for granted.
But, it is a little unfair to write off someone because they work for an affiliate marketer. Take Laura Bates. Just because Bates works for Comfybeddy doesn’t mean that she lacks expertise in the field of sleep and that we must disqualify her judgment. Comfybeddy, after all, has to hire experts to review their mattresses, right? What are Bates’s credentials?
Laura Bates, founder of Comfybeddy, has a sleep-science coach certificate through the Spencer Institute. For those unfamiliar with this field of study, Bates has taken a series of courses through the Spencer Institute which covers such varied and clinical matters as sleep’s impact on sex drive, hormones, surgery recovery, depression, and 100 other areas of human health. The Spencer Institute provides certification and accreditation for a variety of coaching professions, such as life coaching and professional speaking coaching. Spencer is itself accredited by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners—this credentialing board specifically backs the sleep-science coaching certificate that Bates earned—and its life coach training satisfies the continuing education requirements for MFTs (Marriage and Family Therapists) and LCSWs (Licensed Clinical Social Workers).
Nothing in the above paragraph is a lie, save for the implication that any organization mentioned above has any expertise or authority.
What we have here is a chain of appeals to expertise: The Strategists calls on Bates as an expert, who derives her authority from The Spencer Institute, which derives its authority from the American Association of Drugless Practitioners, the AADP. So, if we’re going to verify that Bates has the expertise, we should go where the buck stops and critically examine The AADP.
The AADP is an organization with zero authority in medicine. This is something I can tell you both because I know how to use Google, and can thus show you multiple sources that have deemed the AADP a fake accreditation board popular with diploma mills, but also because I work in credentialing. Credentialing is the small but crucial part of healthcare where administrative staff at hospitals work with accrediting bodies to make sure that providers can legally practice medicine.
I work with accreditation boards on a daily basis, and so I can tell you that The AADP is a spoof of an actual accreditation board, and has no recognized authority. Unlike, say, the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapists, no government recognizes The AADP as a valid source of medical licenses, nor does any government regulate who qualifies for an AADP accredited license. This distinction is key. Medical licenses are like drivers’ licenses: they exist because the government wants to ensure that people are properly educated before undertaking a complicated and life-threatening endeavor. And just as states mandate a certain number of hours of driving instruction and the completion of certain exams, state governments work with accreditation boards to specify the minimum requirements that a prospective provider must fulfill before being licensed. The State of California, for example, requires 3000 hours of instruction for Marriage and Family therapists, a Masters in Social Work with transcripts from an accredited university for Social Workers. This is where accreditation boards, and medical professionals, ultimately derive their authority, the power of the state.
AADP “board certification” has no legal value, but it also lacks any of the implied verification of expertise. The reason why we trust the state to decide who gets licensed is because we trust, rightfully or wrongfully, that they have codified rigorous criteria that will protect patients from malfeasance. The AADP completely lacks such requirements. It requires no predetermined amount of course work or practitioner hours, unlike legitimate licenses. It would be laughed at by my peers in the credentialing world. The best that their utterly mediocre, typo-ridden website can muster to prop up its authority is a list of schools which provide holistic medicine training, including such prestigious institutions as “21st Century Heathen” (website, sadly, defunct) and the Essential Oil Academy. A piece of paper from The AADP is worthless. But, they do, for your convenience, like most good scammers, accept Mastercard.
If the AADP is a scam, then the Spencer Institute, who they accredit, likewise lacks authority. “Sleep-science coaching” certificates are entirely a fabrication of the Spencer Institute, who owns both the curriculum and examination process. Since The AADP does not define the minimum requirements for accreditation, the Spencer Institute is allowed to define the requirements that potential coaches must satisfy. Certification requires no practitioner hours, a mere 3000 less than what a family therapist must complete, and no instruction hours. It requires scoring 70% or higher on a 60 question multiple choice examination. But the lack of any minimum instruction hours doesn’t mean that you can avoid purchasing the Spencer Institute’s expensive coursework. Purchasing the $197 coursework is a pre-requisite for taking the exam, so while you do not need to read the material, you need to have bought it. The only reason an accreditation board would create such an arrangement where downloading copyrighted and trademarked webinars was the sole key to earning a license is if they had no fealty to prospective patients and only an interest in bilking money out of potential practitioners. But even if we believed that the Spencer Institute had patients and practitioners at heart, and that they have truly created coursework that allows graduates to improve 100 different areas of human health: How the hell are they supposed to test that with an exam that’s only 60 questions long? I can do arithmetic! They’re at least 40 questions short!
So we have a scam here, we can agree, but who’s the mark? Is it Laura Bates? She bought a certificate from a fake academy with a fake accreditation and uses it to advertise pillows, credentials which ironically should prove Bates’s lack of expertise. But it’s she, not us, who is now published by Vox Media. It’s she, not us, who has the largest independent media conglomerate linking to her pillow blog, where she makes money by convincing Australians to buy pillows and duvets. Bates didn’t get scammed. We did! And that’s the fact behind fake medical accreditation. They exist not just to scam the potential practitioner, though yoga instructors can attest to how accreditation has bilked them, but to scam potential patients. That’s the reason we rely on medical boards and the state to provide licenses, because scammers have no reason to care about patients.
The reason that credentialing boards exist is the same reason that The Strategist has this experts series: we are not good at identifying experts. Given the number of services we rely on, be they medical, technical, or legal, it would be mentally exhausting were we tasked with always identifying the right experts to trust in such varied fields. I can’t learn how to do a root canal because I want to know if a dentist can actually perform one; I trust dentists running the boards that supply licenses to identify such expertise for me. To survive in a modern, specialized economy we need to outsource our hunt for expertise to specialists in said expertise.
But who watches the watchmen? Who are our experts in expertise? Because if we can’t accurately identify someone whose job is to knock down fake experts, we may be totally hosed.
A small industry has arisen to referee expertise and expose scams, but these have flaws themselves. Scientific journals were once considered expert sources, but pay-for-publish schemes created an entire industry of fake journals that Beall’s List sought to expose. Yet even Beall’s List had problems: 4 in 5 journals that Beall had listed as predatory were legitimate. And constant legal threat of defamation ultimately shut down the list in 2017.
This is seriously a major problem in the consumer economy. Sociological and epistemological, I don’t know how we can gauge whether or not to trust a so-called authority on authority. And the original, good-faith reason that The Strategist turned to experts tells us just how hard we have it: shopping, consuming, is a multi-front war on terrain we are often unfamiliar with. Now, it turns out that half of our trusted generals and aides-de-camp are spies.