Company Blog

Bob here.

Yesterday, I had a very nice interview with reporter Melanie Payne, Consumer Watchdog and regular columnist of the Ft. Myers News-Press (www.news-press.com).  It was about a half-hour or more conversation, of which she penned a great column about us that appeared today.  I commend her on distilling down such a long, detailed conversation into a few hundred words and yet still hitting most of the high points.  Unlike a lot of media folks I’ve experienced in the past, Melanie’s column was fair, while also pleasantly entertaining (which we like, and a quality we strive for ourselves here), and she was fairly accurate in her observations.

She did poke fun at me a little with respect to one of our “Must Have” recommendations, for the Brightfeet Slippers, which are the house slippers with the headlights.  As we state plainly here on the website, our Must Have ratings are based on an editorial consensus - meaning stuff that not only works, but we think everyone needs to know about.  I’ll confess that perhaps a few too many stubbed toes of my own in the middle of the night may have influenced my vote on that particular product - but hey, we are the product of our experience. Right?

Now the only thing I believe she may have misunderstood in our chat was with regard to any editorial discretion we exercise on posting a review on a particular product or not.  If something works, the review gets posted. Period - and certainly irrespective of any current or potential sponsorship.  It’s only when something doesn’t work, or what happens more often, that we can’t complete a review due to a problem with a product, or our own inability or lack of resources to find a suitable environment or test condition to genuinely and fairly see if something can work - that sometimes we elect to punt and move onto the next one.  Or sometimes we just have to park a product awaiting the proper circumstances to conduct a review.

For example, we have a product in queue right now awaiting review (actually, we’ve had it for some time) that requires someone with long straight hair with damaged split ends to observe if it works.  It’s designed to remove split ends.  We don’t know anyone that fits that description.  But hey, if that’s you, and you live in SW Florida and want to volunteer to be in one of our videos, email us!

We especially don’t care to review products that require an extended time lapse measured in months or using our own people as guinea pigs with health or beauty products that also take an extended period of time to observe any results.  Admittedly, that’s a discretionary convenience on our part, and we have made some exceptions to that policy and perform long-term evaluations, and I’m sure will do so in the future when warranted.  But it isn’t our druthers.

We’re certainly under no obligation to review every ASOTV product under the sun, as if that were even physically possible.  It isn’t.  So we try to shoot for products we see advertised the most, ones that people will have the greatest interest in.  If you’ve been a frequent visitor to the site, then you’ve noticed that we try to post new reviews at a pace of approximately one new one per day.  That isn’t always doable, and sometimes we can do more than that - but that’s the general target.  And at that pace, our 100+ reviews available now will grow to over 300 in our first year and then hundreds more each year thereafter.  So please bookmark us and keep checking back to see what’s new.  You’re sure to be both informed and amused.

Melanie also noted that some of our sponsors (who are the ones who make this site available to you free of charge) are some of the companies who make some of the products we’ve reviewed.  While on first blush this may sound a little strange, she was also nice enough to highlight our strict policy, that rather than serve as a shill for the ASOTV product industry, our first sponsorship eligibility requirement is that a product must be verified by us to work as advertised before anyone can seek to promote it via ASOTVI.  As we’ve said repeatedly, part of our mission is not only to help inform consumers, but to also help entrepreneurs and inventors be successful with great new innovations - but only after we’ve verified that what they say they can do, they really can do.  That’s our job.

So a heartfelt thanks from all of us at ASOTVI goes out to Melanie and the Ft. Myers News-Press in helping more of the world discover ASOTVI, and thereby help more folks see for themselves what a lot of these crazy gadgets can really do!