The Real Cost of Amazon's Prime Days

While consumers and brands reap the benefits of Amazon's big sales event, the U.S. government says close to half of its warehouse workers will get injured because of it.

Prime Days: 45% of Warehouse Workers Injured

Amazon’s big Prime Day sale has started, but an American government committee says there are more costs than shipping.

After a year of investigation, the US Senate today released a report that found Amazon's Prime Day event in 2019 injured 1 out of 10 warehouse workers.

And, it says, that only represents the injuries Amazon is legally required to report. It estimates the actual injury rate at about 45% of warehouse workers.

It says Amazon does not adequately staff for busy sales events like Prime Day.

A company spokesperson says the report “draws sweeping and inaccurate conclusions based on unverified anecdotes, and it misrepresents documents that are several years old and contained factual errors and faulty analysis.”

And just in case you missed the government’s feeling on this, the report was published by the Senate committee under the headline “Documenting the Outrageous Level of Corporate Greed at Amazon.”

Two years ago, an investigation by Business Insider found that Amazon warehouse workers were more likely to develop musculoskeletal injuries than workers at non-Amazon warehouses.

“Drive-by” Ads on Google Maps

Years ago, I used to give keynote speeches at marketing conferences all over the world. Probably did about 500 of them.

One of my predictions was that cell phones would get so smart — this was the early 2000s, remember — that brands could target consumers with text messages as they walked by stores. “Hey, you bought some makeup here two months ago. It’s probably out. Want some more?”

I wasn’t a great futurist. The iPhone didn’t exist, so nor did notifications. And consumers were more infatuated with technology than worried about the privacy implications. So this kind of targeting never really came to fruition.

This week, Google finally proved me right — sort of.

‘Add Stop’ ads

People on social media have noticed an ad product called Add Stop ads in Google Maps.

I know that’s a word salad — we’re talking about advertisements that pop up as you’re driving and offer to Add a Stop at the advertiser’s location.

One fellow posted a screenshot of it on social media saying:

Indeed, the screenshot shows the name of the convenience store brand, with a star rating — this particular one was only 2.9 stars — and the word “Quick detour” below it, and the number of minutes away it was. There was also the brand logo and the word Sponsored.

Google: ‘They’re not new’

Google says actually these aren’t new. They call them Promoted Pins. A company spokesperson said they work for gas stations, restaurants, and stores, among others, and said the ads don’t just pop up; they only expand if they’re tapped on, and then disappear quickly after a short time.

That seems to be different than what this user experienced. Some people reported seeing that behaviour in the Google-owned Waze app, but never in Google Maps before.

But maybe something to look into if this kind of targeting might be beneficial to your store.

Let Meta Pick Your Offer — What Could Go Wrong?!

A new ad format coming to Instagram asks marketers to put even more faith in Meta’s AI.

The format is a custom offer that appears directly on Instagram ad call-to-action (CTA) buttons. Normally, a CTA might read Shop Now — this new format adds an offer like “10% off” to that sticker or button.

Less control

But the catch is you won’t be able to pick the offer. If you opt into this, Meta will decide what offer is most likely to convert. You can have up to 20 offers per ad, and Meta will decide the actual discount you’ll be offering.

That might work if you’ve got a tonne of learning data (or media spend to buy that learning), and Meta’s systems haven’t always picked the right option. Sometimes, they’ve put discounts on Shops ads that the advertiser never consented to. If someone bought at that discounted price, well, that’s the price you get.

You will be able to have multiple competitive promotions for Meta to pick from, like percentage or cash discounts, and for now it’s only available on single-media ads in Instagram Stories.

Also, it’s only available to some ad accounts.

How to opt-in

Here’s how to try it out, if you’re brave:

Set up a Conversion ad campaign in Ads Manager and give it Website as the conversion location.

Then, you can enter the website URL and Meta will find your offers or you can type in the offers manually if you prefer.

There will be a step for you to review and confirm this.

LinkedIn’s New ‘Sponsored Newsletters’

LinkedIn is adding sponsored newsletters to its quiver of ad products.

In January, the company launched launched sponsored articles, allowing brands to promote and gate their content. Sponsored newsletters work similarly. Companies can boost their newsletters to attract more sign-ups.

LinkedIn clarified that only company-authored newsletter articles, posted on a Company Page, can be sponsored. Member-authored newsletter articles cannot be sponsored yet, but this feature will be available in the future.

Sponsored newsletters can be part of brand awareness and engagement campaigns. They can be created via the “Content Library” in Campaign Manager.

LinkedIn claims a 47% increase in newsletter engagement over the past year. It should be noted that LinkedIn often publicizes relative metrics, and doesn’t often provide the actual numbers behind that engagement lift, so we don’t really know the scale of that increase.

There are now over 184,000 newsletters on the platform.

This is being rolled out gradually, so the option may not be available to all brands quite yet.

X Will Sue Advertising Group (Probably. Maybe.)

Elon’s back, this time saying he plans to take legal action against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), accusing the advertising coalition of coordinating an effort to restrict free speech on the platform.

This body was established by the World Federation of Advertisers, and it exists to make sure ads aren’t placed next to harmful content.

But Musk says GARM members collude to censor certain speech by imposing restrictions on what they deem “unsafe” platforms, targeting conservative speech in particular.

Since Musk bought Twitter, ad revenue has plummeted to half its previous amount. You might make an argument for some advertisers being put off by Musk literally telling them to “go fuck themselves” or his habit of posting incendiary and factually inaccurate content.

Soooo this is awkward…

What’s strange about this all is that X itself is a member of GARM. In fact, just two weeks ago, they tweeted this:

Yes, reinstated because the platform pulled out of the group when Musk bought the platform.

More saber rattling

Some industry watchers believe this is more of a temper tantrum than any sort of real threat, but Musk has taken up similar suits, most of which he’s lost or dropped.

In Brief

Bloomberg reports that Google’s parent company has backed away from plans to acquire the marketing platform HubSpot. Apparently the two parties didn’t even get to the due-diligence stage in talks. At the end of May, CNBC reported the deal would have been an all-stock purchase. [more]

Google yesterday dropped chats from Google Local, Google Business Profiles, Google Search, and Google Maps. New chats can no longer be started. The company warned marketers back in May this would happen. [more]

Affinity, the design suite that competes with Adobe’s biggest tools, now offers a six month free trial. After that, if you decide to buy it, you only pay once. It’s currently on sale for about $75 US for all three apps — photos, illustration, and publishing — and that includes all operating systems as well. [more]

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