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White Digital Media is a scam. They prey on small businesses to large corporations - if they call your company (and they have many telesales mostly men) hang up. They are based in the US, UK and now India. When they call they say you are going to get published in a magazine: Construction Digital, Manufacturing Digital, Food & Drink Digital, Energy Digital, Health Care Digital, Supply Chain Digital and whatever other names they can create. Then they ask for your supplier list which they then call and pressure through illegal methods to get them to buy an advertisement in one of these fictional print publications. They are created in digital format but charge you rates that are print. Regardless the distribution of these digital magazines is minimal.
Search online for "white digital media fraud" or "white digital media scam" and you will quickly find a ton of stories of people with similar scammed experiences.
I worked with White Digital Media for three months as a social media intern last summer in their Carlsbad “headquarters.” I don’t know what has changed since then so please don’t think this is a conclusive view of how things are now; I just want to give potential employees or clients an idea of what I saw in my brief time there.
Since this was my first internship while I was finishing up school, I didn’t know what to expect from a company, but I immediately found it odd that in the marketing department, everyone sat around their own laptop, headphones in, creating fake social media profiles (with fake names) and commenting on articles from the various WDM properties, to create the illusion that people were reading the articles. As far as I know, it’s still happening now. If you look through any of the company’s FB pages, it’s just employees talking to each other.
Honestly, these social media “initiatives” took up about 95% of my time there. To get credit for my internship, I had to make up extra responsibilities since they felt (as did I) that I learned nothing, and spent my time doing vaguely unethical things.
Occasionally we would get a break from this and were instead tasked with going through other digital magazines and taking snapshots of their paid Front of Book ads, so that we could then put them in our “magazines” to give people the impression that we had the same advertisers as more established competitors. I never knew if this was completely legal, though I had a feeling it was at the very least grossly unethical.
As to the complaints about Glen White, I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but on the occasions I would see him in the office, he was screaming at someone about this or that. I got a very Napoleonic vibe from him.
If you read any of the press releases put out by the company (they put out thousands, though few are ever read by anyone other than the woman at the press release company), they talk about how great their internship program is and that it leads to full time employment, which as far as I could see was true, since interns with no experience were immediately promoted to “managers” and “editors”, though at intern wages. The program goes something like this: intern for three months on very little pay (at the time $100 per week), then becoming a temp employee for another three months while you’re still paid next to nothing and are not eligible for any benefits, and then after those come on as a full time employee, though still making less than a full time WalMart Cashier.