In light of Joystiq’s discovery last night that the PS3-biased Grand Theft Auto IV advertisement on Amazon.com had been changed to reflect its vanilla Xbox 360 twin, we too gave Amazon’s public relations department a call, in the hopes of finding out more about the sudden switcheroo, and Amazon’s policy towards such obvious bias. The answers were rather straightforward.
Speaking with PR Manager Tammy Hovey, we learned that the targeted advertisements appearing on Amazon’s Video Games page were indeed derived from partnerships with Sony and Microsoft. While she couldn’t provide any information on specific ads, she told us that the wording is generally determined jointly by both Amazon and their advertising partner.
So why the sudden change in Sony’s ad campaign? Did bias slip through the cracks and then get yanked by Amazon in an effort to keep their iron-clad reputation? No, explained Hovey, “those campaigns are actually different.” Yesterday’s campaign called for bias, today’s didn’t. Simple enough. Does Amazon charge at different rates?
But Hovey was quick to point out that the potentially offensive wording wouldn’t find its way into advertisements as a matter of course:
“It all depends… we evaluate on a case-to-case basis, and ultimately our focus is on the consumer.”
While we find it worrying that the particular case found yesterday made it through that joint evaluation process, Hovey says that even when it comes to video games, Amazon as a whole is “platform-agnostic” and wants to sell all titles on all systems equally.
Partially satisfying this policy may be, but since platform agnosticism and consumer protection only benefit the individual consumer (instead of society as a whole) Amazon could easily remain the equal opportunity fanboy and use targeted advertising to exploit existing biases among gamers.
Leave a Reply