It's a brave new world of new careers, jobs & avenues, I would imagine Benji thinks he's laying ground work to move up, perhaps to the press or as an analyst, certainly as an "influencer". It's not that preposterous that it could work in spite of all the misgivings I agree with, there's sort of a cottage industry for "content creators" (noise generators) which are just a step above a complete amateur to fill the Twitter-Youtube-Etc tubes. Fake it till you make it is not exactly a new thing. I wholeheartedly agree those sales info
are often not terribly useful to consumers if not straight up pushing narrative PR using a morcel of information, bit there's no denying there's an audience for that.
Oh and for the e-peen too obviously.
I didn't know about the other guy working at NPD, that's interesting. Looks like a way for NPD to mitigate the appeal of unsanctioned leaks and perhaps dipping toes in all that viral stuff kids do.