Three Analyses of the Deal Round-Up (Seeing Like An Affiliater Marketer Part 9)
Rhythmanalysis
Prelude on the Rhythmanalysis
Henri Lefebvre proposed the existence of two types of rhythms in modern life, the cyclical and the linear. Every day, with cyclical regularity, you punch into work and you do the same general genre of task; and, if you are one of the victors of capitalism, a seperate rhythm plays above the cyclical, a linear momentum which inflates the size of your bank account, inflates the prestige of your title, gradually reshapes your life day-by-day, ever-forward.
The tension between these two rhythms defines the anxiety and exuberance of our lives. When self-care advocates say that recovery is not linear, they are speaking Lefebvre’s language: the world, we allege, must get better, if not daily then at least each pay period, and the self-care advocate’s mantra calls this bluff, saying that some days we will feel worse than the day before. It is linear progress that makes the cyclical rote of our lives seem moral, or at least worth stomaching. We project this need for a linear rhythm onto history itself when we invoke Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s adage that the arc of the moral universe, while long, bends towards justice. While racist violence and bigotry cyclically appear on our screens, we know that things will get better, and when things don’t, when the arc seems particularly long and when the linear growth we were promised does not transcend that cyclical rhythm, darkness wells in our soul. We feel cheated by any deviation from this linearity. Given how rote our cyclical lives can feel, how hopeless, staffed with the same characters and dependent upon the same duties, I don’t necessarily blame individuals who catastrophize about some absent linear rhythm. I do it too.
Most apologia for our modern times rests on the linear rhythm. That’s the premise of Dr. King’s moral universe. Our cyclical rhythm of day-in, day-out, lacks sex appeal, and SpongeBob has the last word on the particular alienation of such cycles.
I like the rhythmanalysis, and I think many aspects of our modern lives slot well into this schema. Given I have invoked MLK, self-care, and a SpongeBob meme, an odd throuple, I think the rhythmanalysis to be a robust and powerful analytical framework, and that identifying how the processes of our lives fall into these different rhythms can be quite useful when we address our discontents.
Rhythmanalysis of the Deal Round-up
The deal round-up defines the cyclical rhythm of affiliate marketing. Wirecutter, The New York Time’s affiliate marketing arm, features a daily deals newsletter. The Inventory, from G/O Media, evolved from Kinja Deals, a weekly deal round-up started in 2012. The Strategist, from Vox Media, gives us the Best Bet, a single superlative product, featured on their home page, that is available at a discount. The deal round-up has an analogue precursor: the Pennysaver flyer. Pennysavers served individual geographic communities, and relayed the deals available in the area. The affiliate marketer’s deal round-up extends this service to the entire digital world.
As apologia for modernity rests on the linear rhythm, affiliate marketers, the paid defenders of consumerism, celebrate the linear appeal of acquisition. Like the moral arc of the universe, we believe that our lives bend towards, if not justice, then at least fabulosity and comfort. The affiliate marketing genre reflects this by portraying everything in terms of the life-changing and the grand, in terms of incontrovertible alteration: The Strategist uses its This Thing’s Incredible series to do a deep dive into one life-changing product, all things are the best, and something as simple as a squeezable egg cures ADHD. When you tell your personal history, you look to the linear rhythm, and affiliate marketers want you to be able to tell a life story bifurcated neatly into the era before you bought this revolutionary product, and everything that came afterwards. And if you can’t tell that story, at least, the affiliate marketer hopes you will find the mere act of acquisition enough of a linear momentum to give meaning to your life. Even if no individual product was life-defining, the idea is that with each day you should have more things in your life. I have felt that acutely since I’ve stopped buying new things. Often, I lament the fact that this week I have not purchased a new product, that I have not added something to my collection. It feels sometimes like I’m morally cheating myself if I don’t buy something new, if I refuse to participate in this linear momentum. The affiliate marketer would love to help me with that.
The cyclicality of these weekly deals brings the affiliate marketer back down to earth. The Best Bet for 3/30/2021 was 20% off a pair of Ray-Bans. On 3/31/2021, it was eighty dollars off of a rolling duffle. Since the Best Bet doesn’t provide any verbiage to describe or advertise the product, it never adopts the adulatory tones of linear victory that define the rest of the genre. The Best Bet will never allege a pasta sauce the answer to our woes. Instead, we get to see just a product, just a discount, and we remember that’s the real reason that we came here to an affiliate marketer, to get marketed to. Then, in The Strategist, we see capitalism’s two cycles paralleled: at our jobs, we do our routines and find our bank accounts bigger, and if we routinely check into The Strategist and buy the Best Bet, we will find those precious discounts compounded over time and likewise find a home full of valuables bought at a steal.
Half-Remembered Empirical Economics
One on Retail
I’m a former economics major, and though I have yet to figure out how to incorporate that into my brand and monetize my fine education, I do remember two empirical studies which elucidate the role of the deal round-up in today’s retail economy.
The first study identifies a key fact about the retail industry in the late 1990s, though I allege that this truth would hold today. Stores choose how to price their goods using one of two pricing strategies: the everyday-low-price and cyclical discounting. The everyday-low-price store looks like Walmart, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, those places where products are sold for the same low price with no real seasonal variation. You can expect good prices, but you can’t expect for Walmart to hold a blowout sale.
The opposite is cyclical discounting, a pricing strategy where the sticker price for products is set higher than they would be at an everyday-low-price store, but where the retailer offers a number of sales and coupons for products in their stores. Kohl’s is an example of this: if you’re a Kohl’s member, they will send you a booklet full of coupons every week. While a shirt at Kohl’s says it’s $30, quite high in the fast fashion world, with Kohl’s coupons you can expect to buy the shirt for much cheaper. You might not have all the coupons you need to buy the shirt cheaply this week, but wait a month and you’ll be able to get what you need at a sizable discount.
I won’t go into the relative merits of these two models, why different stores choose their pricing strategy, because that doesn’t matter for this post. Instead, I want to claim the following: if broadly half of retail relies on a pricing strategy based on temporary discounts and deals, then a deal round-up plays an important role in the retail landscape, both for consumers and for companies. Consumers cannot take part in a deal that is unknown to them, and clearly retailers want consumers to take them up on these deals, or else they would not stake their entire pricing model upon it. The deal round-up then, like the Pennysaver before it, communicates changes in prices that underpin the entire retail ecosystem. It is necessary for this current configuration of capitalism to function.
One on Ads
This brings me to a second study on the nature of advertising. An outstanding question in empirical economics is whether or not advertising simply communicates the specifications and prices of a product for the consideration of rational consumers, or if advertisements are designed to shape the preferences of the viewer, or possibly even exploit the unconscious psychologies of a consumer to promote irrational purchasing. This is really a trillion dollar question, and one without an answer.
That Carl’s Jr.’s ads are so notorious for having hot women eating their burgers that there exist YouTube compilations ranking the sex appeal of their ads suggests the management of that fast food chain sees advertising as a means to change how consumers feel about their burgers through the mental association of sexual iconography, whereas the product comparisons available on Amazon’s pages, spare menus delineating differing specifications, rely on the theory that ads are purely informational and exist to communicate the qualities of a product to the rational consumer who may then purchase them.
The deal round-up comes closest to this mode of advertising, the ad as a form of communication. The affiliate marketer does not adulate, does not try to convince the reader that a Logitech keyboard will make their gaming rig unbeatable. It simply tells you the price, an objective characteristic of the good.
An empirical study, whose authors I don’t recall, tried to solve this problem by looking at Google advertising. Using browsing history, they rounded up groups of similar consumers and then created control and experimental groups by exposing some consumers to advertisements for a specific product, and some consumers to no advertisements at all. They found no difference in the likelihood of a consumer purchasing a product when exposed to the advertising. This was a point of evidence for the ad-as-communication camp: preferences seem unbudged by advertising, and instead we can predict the likelihood of a purchase from browser histories, a good stand-in for consumer tastes.
I may not be remembering the nature of the experiment correctly, but I can tell you that the debate over what ads do is an outstanding debate in consumer psychology and industrial organization, and that I have at least read one piece of empirical evidence that could convince one to accept that ads don’t change our psyches.
Now we can see why a deal round-up, with its austerity and lack of adulation, might be useful for companies. Here is an ad that just communicates prices. It does not try to convince you that a burger will get you laid. And, if this thesis holds, that ads don’t have some supernatural power over us but fit in a rational theory of purchase, then the deal round-up seems benign, helpful even. It’s an ad simply telling it like it is. It is an ad that benefits the consumer as much as it does the vendor.
Such a defense of affiliate marketing is indeed uncharacteristic of this newsletter. But maybe the deal round-up is a neutral ground. Maybe this digital Pennysaver does present something valuable to us.
The Bullshit Job
It’s a popular adage, and one seemingly with analytical power, that some number of jobs render no benefit to society, that they are utterly bullshit. David Graeber’s initial formulation goes like this: the job is bullshit when “If the position were eliminated, it would make no discernable difference in the world.” I think it gets stretched a bit, nowadays, to include a moral dimension, deeming a job bullshit if its elimination would lead to a world no discernably different, or a world noticeably better, that is, if its existence is morally neutral or morally hazardous.
There are two arguments hidden under the hood of this analysis, neither controversial, but both of which require subjective interpretation. Namely, if there is a non-bullshit job, that entails that the processes of a job can meaningfully make things happen, that something truly is produced in our productivity, and that there exists some means to evaluate the products of our labor as beneficial or detrimental to society. I think most would agree to some flavor of the above. Our jobs produce something or else capitalists would have no interest in paying us, and these actions can either benefit or harm society. This isn’t to say a job can’t be neutral on both fronts. A graphic designer whose redesign of a plantain chip bag ultimately goes unused has had literally no impact on society, and even if they did, a more rad font for a Goya product lacks moral valence. But a job is only not bullshit if it qualifies for both criteria: if its duties make a discernible change in the world, and if those changes are for the better.
Ideas that feel uncontroversial oft present the most controversy, and I want to use the deal round-up to identify that, though we may agree in the abstract that some jobs are bullshit, how we define productivity and how we define what morally benefits a society makes the analytic of the bullshit job more an apple of discord than a political rallying call. In fact, I think we will find, by examining the deals round-up in terms of the bullshit job, that one can make quite politically retrogressive cases when defining bullshit and non-bullshit jobs, and that the entire term begins to destabilize when one realizes that jobs themselves are composite interventions, and that decomposing jobs into their more atomic parts, their duties and tasks, reveals a more sophisticated universe than the analytic of the bullshit job can handle.
Let us turn to the deal round-up and try and identify whether writing such a round-up is bullshit or not. I think we can make the positive case that the world would be discernibly worse off were we to terminate this position. Turning back to our empirical economics, we have made one case for the deal round-up being discernibly impactful to society. The cyclical discounter, and the retail economy at large, relies on the deal, and so a service that makes clear the deals available to consumers would have huge economic impact. If we can prove that these deal round-ups lead people to buy things–and that the affiliate marketer, a genre of publication obsessed with metrics and revenue accounting, has not discontinued this practice assures us that people do partake in the deal round-up–then we can prove that there is discernible difference of great import.
Additionally, we can rely on two other concepts from economics in order to portray this impact as morally just. First, if the advertisement truly does not sway desires, but makes it easier for consumers to make good on their wants, then we can’t portray the deal round-up as a form of hypnosis that tricks people into buying things that they don’t need. With this salacious interpretation of advertising dead, we can move onto the second idea from economics, that of consumer surplus. Consumer surplus is a way of tracking the welfare of consumers making a purchase. The idea is quite simple: the consumer surplus for a given transaction is the maximum price the consumer would be willing to pay minus the price of the good. The idea is that, if a consumer would pay 25 dollars for a shirt, and the shirt was offered at 20 dollars, then in a way the consumer has saved 5 dollars, and those 5 dollars, which now can get spent elsewhere, represent how much this transaction has positively impacted their life. We can now convert the deal round-up into a measure of consumer welfare with a dollar amount: if the consumer were to buy the shirt, with the deal round-up’s help, for 18 dollars instead, then the consumer would have saved 7 dollars, and therefore have 7 dollars’ worth of consumer surplus, and we could directly attribute 2 dollars of that to the deal round-up.
Suddenly, the deal round-up goes from a vague synecdoche for capitalism to a source of real and well-accounted for consumer welfare. Under this analysis, we couldn’t dare declare the deal round-up a bullshit job.
I disagree here, of course. For one, the analysis doesn’t recognize that these discounted brands are luxury alternatives to the goods we use every day. Ray-Bans are a great example. Do we really think to ourselves that the world is made a better place because someone got Ray-Bans on the cheap? Here, we can quibble with the idea of a “discernible difference” to society. Would there be much a discernible difference were this fellow with the Ray-Bans to purchase a cheap pair of sunglasses instead? The luxury commodity has no great advantage over the cheaper alternative, and even with the 20% discount, the consumer could buy a cheaper pair either from another brand, or simply by doing as I do and buying the Ray-Bans used.
But still, I’m sure we can come up with a world where buying Ray-Bans for cheap is a morally mandatory discernible difference. Maybe we could make an argument about inequality, that the cheaper Ray-Bans will allow the middle class access to these finely crafted goods. If we argue the new Ray-Bans really superlative, and we argue that the discount allows more communal access, then we can redeem the deal round-up from bullshit.
This brings me to the next trouble with the bullshit job, which is that jobs are not atomic particles, but are instead composed of individual duties which may or may not themselves be bullshit or not-bullshit. We can make the argument for the Ray-Bans above, but can we argue similarly for 4/2/2021’s Best Bet, a luxury vitamin-C skin serum? Maybe we can, but what happens if, in twenty years, we identify that skin serums, in general, have no clinical benefits, or maybe this particular brand gets linked to skin cancer. Then, was the job of writing the deal round-up bullshit or not? Does writing the deal round-up as a job become bullshit the second that they recommend a product for which we cannot conceive some moral schema lionizing the purchase? Or is it a percentage thing, where if at least 20% or 40% of the products have tangible benefits, we keep it in the world of the non-bullshit? Or do we need to do more sophisticated moral accounting and identify the aggregate benefits of Ray-Bans and the aggregate damages of skin cancer and then use some sophisticate cost-benefit algorithm to figure out whether or not the job was bullshit?
Anything morally composite requires some form of moral accounting to determine if it is truly moral or not, and no one can really agree on how moral accounting should work. In situations where someone’s job has them doing good things and bad things, there is no universally agreed upon means to adjudicate whether or not that job is morally repugnant or a blessing with occasional exception.
And work is now necessarily composite. Let’s assume that our deal round-up writer still only ever advertises the best products. Well, there is no chance that this is the only duty that the deal round-up writer has. There is likely nobody specifically staffed to write the deal round-up, and I suspect it a group effort that many staff writers participate in, in addition to writing copy for other review articles. This brings us to a new complication in moral accounting: even if we can agree that the deal round-up is morally good and non-bullshit, what happens if out writer writes a pillow review that platforms fraudulent medical licenses, or waste someone’s time by getting them to spend some hours optimizing their pasta routine, or if our writer convinces someone to buy a glazed ceramic egg instead of simply picking up a rock from outside, or if our writer allows the commission rate for a product rather than its inherent value to sway their product reviews. I think all of the above outcomes to be bullshit. Would they morally taint the job, or would the benefit of the deal round-up deliver it from bullshit?
The bullshit job, I think, is more an aesthetic judgment than a critical analysis. A job feels like bullshit, but this feeling never gets validated through rigorous accounting. I call it aesthetic since it reminds me of our judgements of a novel or a movie: we say that it felt meaningful, edifying, appealing, but when we say this we don’t mean that every inch of it was meaningful, edifying, appealing, that we had something laudatory to say about every shot or sentence or word, nor would we be able to propose how many of those shots and sentences and words were worthy of lauding, nor really could we identify the ways in which these constitutive elements would have to change in order for us to deem the novel or movie as meaningless rather than meaningful. We call a film or novel meaningful as a holistic summation of our experience, and I think we do the same with a bullshit job.
But a holistic summation cannot underpin analysis. Maybe we can call a given deliverable bullshit, say that a Ray-Ban deal round-up has no discernible impact on the world. But we would find it hard to generalize this sentiment to the duty, or individual sentence in the job description, that birthed this deliverable, and we would find it impossible to extend this to the job in its entirety.
This isn’t to say that aesthetic judgments have no value in cultural criticism. But when we call a bullshit job bullshit, we must know what we are playing at aesthetics rather than accounting, and so declaring it a framework capable of morally adjudicating which jobs matter and which jobs don’t extends the framework beyond its limits.
I hope the deal round-up has clarified this, as well as other topics of interest, during our time here together.