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- Amazon's Secret Spy Program Revealed
Amazon's Secret Spy Program Revealed
Fake company, real products — Reports say Amazon tricked its competitors to gain confidential information
by Tod Maffin (LinkedIn • social media) |
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AMAZON • Fake Company Spied on Competitors: Reports
Word is getting out about a secret project Amazon ran in 2015 to allegedly spy on their competitors.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Amazon started a fake company called Big River Services International (Get it? “Big River”?) in 2015.
This fake company made real products — like photo frames and clothing — and sold them through their competitors like Walmart and eBay, all apparently in an attempt to get more info on sales contracts and the likes.
Team members attended their rivals’ seller conferences and met with competitors identifying themselves only as employees of Big River Services, instead of disclosing that they worked for Amazon.
They were given non-Amazon email addresses to use externally—in emails with people at Amazon, they used Amazon email addresses—and took other extraordinary measures to keep the project secret. They disseminated their reports to Amazon executives using printed, numbered copies rather than email. Those who worked on the project weren’t even supposed to discuss the relationship internally with most teams at Amazon.
An internal crisis-management paper gave advice on what to say if discovered. The response to questions should be: “We make a variety of products available to customers through a number of subsidiaries and online channels.”
But despite how well prepped they sounded, the alleged spies still made some amateur gumshoe mistakes. Some Big River team members listed Amazon as their employer on LinkedIn.
For its part, Amazon says it was just collecting data and nothing to see here — a spokesperson told media “Benchmarking is a common practice in business.”
Amazon has faced scrutiny for its treatment of sellers on its own platform before. A [U.S.] congressional committee found in 2020 that the company had used data on sales by third-party sellers to create its own version of the products — usually to the detriment of the independent sellers and their businesses.
A lawsuit from the FTC last year also claimed that Amazon effectively raised prices by increasing what the company charged its third-party sellers and punishing them for offering lower prices on websites besides Amazon.
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YOUTUBE • Your Ad Beside Most Popular Shorts
A new ad option for brands wanting to capitalize on the vertical video trend: a way to place your ads alongside popular YouTube Shorts.
The new “Select Shorts” placement will show your ads among the most popular videos in five content categories:
Entertainment
Beauty, Fashion & Lifestyle
Food & Recipes
Gaming
Automotive
This will, of course, give more opportunity to be seen with some of the platform’s viral content.
YouTube says Shorts are now seen by 2 billion users each month, and viewership on TV has also gone up after they added a Shorts interface to their connected TV apps.
The company also updated its tips guide called “ABCD’s of Effective Ads” to include Shorts. Probably won’t be much new here, if you’ve seen similar tips from TikTok and Instagram Reels documents, but might be handy if you’re just starting out with vertical.
You can download YouTube Shorts ads tips here.
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FACEBOOK • 3rd Party Groups Posting Ending
Sunday is the last day that brands will be able to post to Facebook Groups using a third-party tool.
This means that social media management tools like Buffer and Agorapulse and Hootsuite won’t be able to post to Facebook Groups for you.
Some platforms, like Sprout Social, simply no longer offer that posting ability any more. Others, like Buffer, say they’re considering a mobile reminder system which would still let you schedule content on their platform, but you would have to manually post directly on Facebook.
To be clear, we’re talking about Facebook Groups here, not Facebook Pages. Your company brand page is unaffected by this.
This appears to be Meta’s attempt to reduce the amount of spam and commercial content that has populated many groups.
SNAPCHAT • Strategy: “Just Spend More With Us!”
Snapchat has released a new report that looked at three years of ads in their app, across five different verticals.
Commerce
Tech
Telecommunications
Travel
Quick service restaurant
Although the dataset represented more than $15 billion in ad spend, it came from only 36 advertisers.
And, as you might expect from a study funded by a platform, the research found that platform to be really strong. (One of the headings in the report literally reads “Spend more on Snapchat!”)
Snap… notes that, according to the analysis, brands could actually increase their Snap ads spend by up to 33%, and they’d still continue to drive strong results.
I’m fairly skeptical of estimations like this, as they assume a lot in predicting broader response patterns. But based on the data available, the figures do indicate that Snap advertisers could improve their results by increasing their ad budgets in the app.
Snapchat says their app garnered the highest return relative to all marketing channels for 3 out of 5 verticals, and outperformed paid social across all categories.
X • AI-Powered Trending Section Goes Off the Rails
X, formerly Twitter, recently killed off its Trending column — which used to have some human intervention — and replaced it with its AI bot’s summary of trending content.
That bot, called Grok, does a decent job of that task — most of the time.
But when it goes awry, it really goes awry.
Earlier this week, X’s trending section broke this news about a basketball star: "Klay Thompson Accused in Bizarre Brick-Vandalism Spree."
Except Klay Thompson did not commit criminal vandalism.
It seems the bot got confused by the slang term for missing a basketball shot — sometimes known as “throwing bricks.”
As of this morning when we checked, that completely inaccurate news item was still up on X.
It’s been a rough week for the beleaguered app.
Another Advertising Pulling Out
Yesterday, the car manufacturer Hyundai announced that it’s pulling its ads from the platform after pro-Nazi content was placed beside their brand promotions.
It happened just days after NBC said it found thousands of accounts posting or amplifying pro-Nazi content — at least 150 of those accounts sporting the paid blue verified checkmark.
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