Weekly Sponsor Concerns Update - Jan 30, 2024

mynameGeoff · January 30

Hey everyone. Sorry for not posting the last couple of weeks. The business team was away at CES, as well as our regular jobs on top of that, so we weren’t watching the forums as closely. But we have taken some time to look at things that have popped up over the last week or two, and we have a few follow-ups.

Wicked Cushions
We saw a post where a pair of Wicked Cushions earpads found themselves pretty mangled. We shared the photos with Wicked Cushions and asked for their two cents. It is a rare thing that can happen to their ear pads. If a user’s sweat has more acidity in it, it expedites the breaking down of certain materials. While it’s far from the standard, this is exactly why Wicked Cushions offers free replacements. They’re sorry that it did happen to this individual, and they strongly encourage reaching out for replacements. The process should be relatively simple.

Ridge Wallet
There was a post about someone being given a bit of a runaround with Ridge’s support. Emails weren’t being responded to, and support on Twitter seems just to be automated. In short, the person keeps being told to try again in 2 weeks. After two weeks pass, they’re told the same thing. This has happened a few times now. We have yet to hear back from Ridge regarding what is happening. Traditionally, we’ve seen pretty positive experiences with their support. We just wanted to say, “Hey, we see the post, and we’ll follow up.”

AG1
There has been an influx of concerns surrounding AG1. Last September when we ran our first WAN Show ad with them, there were concerns about the ingredients and whether it contained lead or carcinogens. Which was addressed in a forum post here. In the talks that we’ve had with AG1, we made it clear that we didn’t want to make sweeping claims that taking it would change your life. We didn’t want to advertise it as a replacement for taking multivitamins or a dietary replacement, and that was never what AG1 intended. They simply asked to discuss why the members of our team who drink it choose to drink it and had us run with that. Nobody is saying that AG1 is going to change your life. If you want an alternative to taking vitamins, AG1 is an alternative that some of us enjoyed before starting any sponsorship deal. More concerns have been brought up since writing this; we'll follow up regarding these concerns with the brand and will address them in a future post.

ASUS

One benefit of CES is that we can sit down with some decision-makers and have face-to-face conversations, as we did with ASUS.

ASUS has doubled their presence in the Sponsor Complaints thread, and its support team has prioritized responding to issues as quickly as possible. They will continue to be on the Forum assisting users to close out the open issues and follow-up with them on timely responses on escalations. Also, we'll be reaching out to those who have been assisted by ASUS Support to see if they are satisfied with the resolution they’ve been presented. We want to help ASUS improve because we do believe it benefits everyone in the end.

We hope you all have a great week. @Other James will be back next week with another update.

Edited January 30 by mynameGeoff
*The double presence occurred before CES, during November timeframe, edited for clarity