We wrote in the past about receiving an award from BUILD News Magazine for invented reasons. Unfortunately things haven’t changed and we kept receiving awards, perhaps because we were the ones who were invited to pay.
Someone asked us in a comment whether we can indeed prove that we received these emails, so we’re gonna do just that. In fact, we plan to list all the emails from AI Global Media’s magazines sometimes in the future, dealing with those received from BUILD News Magazine (build-news.com) in this article. It turns out we received quite a few and there were more, but we deleted some at the time.
Clicking on the email subject links will take you on the original email, saved verbatim as html and the full email headers included.
- Nominated for an unwarranted award
- Invited to purchase a trophy for an unwarranted award
- Received another unwarranted award
- Same award, confirmation deadline
- Someone cancelled, it’s an “opportunity”
- Exclusive winner of yet another unwarranted award!
- Messages are more effective when repeated
- Exclusivity is suddenly lost
- You can still buy the trophy
1. Nominated for an unwarranted award
Confirm your nomination – BUILD’s 2015 Construction & Engineering Awards – Tue, 18 Aug 2015, sent by someone named Peter.
2. Invited to purchase a trophy
Exclusive offer for House Extension Designs London – Thu, 27 Oct 2016, sent by Dan above and this is a follow-up of the previous email, the one we’re writing about in detail here.
He says that they “have surplus stock of trophies available” and that he’d like “to offer House Extension Designs London a reduced rate for these”. But we haven’t done anything in terms of “defining the world” to receive a prize for something like that, nor did we asked for a trophy. Was he trying to sell a trophy to me there?
3. Received another unwarranted award
House Extension Designs London’s selection as Sustainable Building Firm of the Year – Sat, 12 Nov 2016, sent by someone named Dominic.
This is yet another follow-up message where he claims that throughout the course of the 2016, their “dedicated research team” has put together profiles and evaluating portfolios to find the top firms from Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Oceania. Here, we won the “Sustainable Building Firm of the Year”.
“After a rigorous judging process, the final winners were selected and the team have put House Extension Designs London forward with the title of ‘Sustainable Building Firm of the Year’.” We can’t make an evidence-based assessment to determine the rigorosity of the method or methods used in judging who gets an award or not, but it’s easy to arrive to a conclusion in that sense when you know you can’t be winning a prize for something that you either didn’t do or you it clearly doesn’t apply to your case.
Here’s how we know that. According to BUILD’s website, the Sustainable Building award is “provided exclusively on merit” – that is, for the quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward, according to Oxford Dictionaries website. I could stop right here and call the prize bullshit, because we know we’re not particularly good or worthy – we’ve been to industry meetings and we had the chance to compare with our competitors. We’re good, yet not particularly good. So BUILD Magazine speculated yet again, hoping we’d let our pride take over.
There’s more, bear with me. They also say on their website that the awards are “focussed on rewarding the efforts of the individuals and firms who have helped shape the world of Eco-friendly and Sustainable buildings across the globe”. Which is not us. We haven’t shaped the world of Eco-friendly and Sustainable buildings in the least, not one bit. We promise. We also haven’t “moulded and changed the global construction market for the better”.
This is the second time when we have received a BUILD Magazine award for invented reasons. It can’t be a mistake.
4. Same award, confirmation deadline
BUILD’s Sustainable Building Firm of the Year Award claim Deadline – Tue, 22 Nov 2016, sent by the same Dominic.
5. Someone cancelled, it’s an “opportunity”
Sustainable Building Firm of the Year Awards Cancellation – Fri, 02 Dec 2016, sent by the same Dominic.
6. Exclusive winner of yet another unwarranted award!
Innovators in Sustainability – House Extension Designs London – Mon, 16 Jan 2017, sent by someone named Daniel.
You’re not gonna believe this, although the same template is used. We won again. This time for being innovators in sustainability, the exclusive winner for the whole UK. Apart from the fact that I can’t even tell what that means precisely, I can tell that it’s a fake award because – fact checking – we have not innovated anything, period.
Like with the other awards, BUILD uses a “dedicated research team” who found “only the most creative and innovative firms when it comes to sustainable building and construction” in the UK. Fact checking again: we are not the most creative firm in the UK in terms of construction and we can easily prove it.
It’s funny though we they forgot that we were the exclusive winner of the award and later on (#8) to claim we were one in the list of winners. I guess we’re lucky we didn’t took the exclusivity.
This is the third time when we have received a BUILD Magazine award for invented reasons. Certainly, you see it’s a business model and you understand how AI Global Media is making money with this.
7. Messages are more effective when Repeated
Innovators in Sustainability – House Extension Designs London – Tue, 24 Jan 2017, same Daniel as above.
8. Exclusivity is suddenly lost
Deadline approaching to confirm House Extension Designs London’s involvement as Build’s Innovators in Sustainability – Thu, 09 Feb 2017, same Daniel as above.
You know how we came to be the exclusive winner of an award that could not real, as I explained above? It turns out House Extension Designs London is now just one in a list of winners. You can’t say they haven’t tried to pair us three times with the same award.
9. You can still buy the trophy
Trophy offer for House Extension Designs London – Tue, 21 Feb 2017, same Daniel as above.
That seems awkwardly familiar. Weren’t we invited last year to buy a trophy as well? We were indeed. And if you’re on this page, you were probably invited too.
Did you receive an award from one of AI Global Media magazines as well? Tell us in the comments, please. You can read what others have said in the comments of the previous post I wrote.
31-05-2019: updated internal and external links (replaced a broken url with an archive.org version).
AI Global Media is a such a spammer! We received 2 awards already and the year is not even over. Someone ought to put an end to this practice, which is bad for the industry but even worse for the consumers who believe that the companies they’re hiring for whatever service have won REAL awards and are somehow better than the competition who, for what we know, haven’t won anything but were doing a fine job nonetheless.
It makes me so frustrated!.
Our agency also randomly received two of the awards from AI Global Media, one from SME News Magazine and one from EU Business News magazine. As you can imagine, we didn’t earn any of these for real.
I guess the business is alive and well and there’s still money to be made from this type of ego-driven false advertising that companies are happy to pay for.
Someone should create a list of companies that have received such pay-to-display kind of awards, so their clients know that they’ve engaged in unethical practices to create the appearance of being “award-winning”.
I don’t understand why doesn’t a consumer protection organisation step in to do something about this.
You know, I was looking at their Google Business profile (it appears on the right side of Google search results) and there is this picture of their actual staff, from what I gather, and they all look like they’ve been coerced into posing for the picture – you know, for the company to look good, PR stuff.
Gosh, it’s the most depressing thing you’ll find today. I really feel for those guys, some of them are probably just starting up, fresh meat for the grinder, others have no choice – the bills are piling up, they have kids, society pressures them to work, to make money somehow. Here they are, working for Ai Global Media, a company who’s business model is shady at best and a poster child for why neoliberalism is depressing and cringy at worst.
I’m sure some even convinced themselves that this is real work and it’s decent and who cares what the interwebs think if they put food on the table and a roof above their heads, “It’s just work, you know?”.
I do know. And I sincerely hope that they can move on and find something else.
We’ve been spammed by Ai Global Media for about 6 times now, from 3 of their “magazines”.
What have we come to?
I’ve just received an SME award. How completely random. Who are these people?