Personal Window Shopper
I think one of the reasons I am so drawn to large affiliate marketing platforms is because, even though my Nothing New Challenge precludes me from purchasing their wares, a good affiliate marketer finds a way to blend all of the joys of window shopping with personal shopping. I get to see the fantastic products that one day, maybe, I will buy. And these writers work so hard to round up the goods relevant to my tastes, to shop for me.
I think comparing these writers to personal shoppers apt, and that doing so teases out a major difference between them and other content creators working today. These personal window shoppers make themselves invisible. While for online content creators we expect biographical details, to be charmed as much with the person as with their work, customer service relationships like the personal shopper require a certain silence and invisibility on the part of the customer servant. We can compare the invisibility of writers for The Strategist, a Vox Media product, to the major fandoms that have cropped up around other Vox properties: Polygon, Vox Media’s platform dedicated to video games and tech, has a Fandom.com wiki which records the lives and lore of creators like Brian David Gilbert and Karen Han, whereas writers for Vox have created personal brands strong enough to support independent endeavors, like Anne Helen Petersen’s and Matthew Yglesias’s Substacks. Compare this to how tamely and timidly the writers for The Strategist present themselves. These bios divulge personal details, but only details that might compel a reader to trust them as an expert in the products that they recommend. Lauren Ro’s bio highlights that she’s a new mom, and she will sell you children’s helmets. Karen Iorio Adelson loves cats, and she can help you out with a number of pet-related needs.
In customer service relationships, this is the norm. I am a customer servant: I deliver analytics to hospital systems, and I am often on the phone with my stakeholders at the hospitals to which I am contracted. On calls, I focus on the product. When I am asked to solicit an anecdote, to make myself visible, I like to mention that I used to work for Epic, an EMR vendor they are likely to have worked with, and how that makes me uniquely able to capture and analyze quality-of-care data. If something more personal is warranted, I may mention to Midwestern customers that I once lived in the Midwest, or I may mention to a Virginian customer that I have a few friends in North Carolina, and may wonder aloud how close their hospital is away from the border between these two states. I foreground either the customer or the product, and I think that the bios of The Strategist’s writers do much the same.
In fact, an affiliate marketer is further limited in this regard. If customer and product are the only kosher topics for a customer servant, what is left for a customer servant who, like all writers, never gets to meet their customer? Product is all that is left. And so, these biographies focus mostly on the details relevant to products.
As such, our relationship to them is likewise limited. They do not build up the Twitter followings that even minor journalists do: Lauren Ro has 716 followers, Ignacia for G/O Media’s The Inventory, a veteran of the affiliate-marketing industry with credits at Buzzfeed, has 466 followers. Compare this to Gabby Birenbaum, a mere intern at Vox, who has 1200.
I am not opposed to a more muted relationship with writers. The discontents of parasocial fandoms, the sort of instinct that leads people to write fan fiction about Nate Silver, has made me skeptical of the personality-driven relationship to journalists that our current content-creation paradigm promotes. But our relationship with affiliate marketers is different and worth noting. When someone is both content creator and customer servant, the stain of service overpowers their status as creators, and so we ask them to be invisible, wallpaper, product.