Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
Why would a globally known brand spend this incredible amount of money?
Amazon was the largest single advertiser in the US over the past year.
Overtaking the Cokes, the P&Gs and the GE's
That works out to $19 million a day.
There are millions of companies the world over with a lower annual turnover.
Most of the spend is automated. Has to be.
Even of you wanted to, blowing that kind of money on traditional media is hard to manage.
And where would Amazon spend?
They have to ride on Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram's networks.
Talk about paying your competitors! Who are worried that Amazon has a stranglehold on data related to purchases.
But Google and Facebook also have to pay to be on Amazon's ad network.
So, it's a wary dance around the ring
Amazon is a lot more than an eCommerce giant
It's biggest earner, AWS, is under threat from Microsoft's and Google's cloud services.
They have to protect their turf.
Echo and Alexa have sharp competitors.
While Amazon is building its own ad network, it's not as big as AdWords or Social Graph just yet. But not for long.
The growth monster has a voracious appetite.
World domination is never easy
The biggest advertisers are here
This time, will the show go on?
A movie is a product you consume once. Usually.
You pay for it in advance.
When it's over you walk out with a spring in your step. Or curse the time you wasted
The trailers are a taste test. But only for your eyes and ears.
Popcorn is optional and not included in the price of the ticket.
Movies are a highly unusual product category.
With most products, you know what to expect.
And you look forward to a repeat experience. Chocolates. Perfumes. Food.
But movies are ephemeral.
The ghostly images play on screen.
Dark mysteries. Torrid romances. Gangsters you wouldn't want to meet in real life.
And heroines you would.
You build relationships with people you'll never know. Or meet.
The most beautiful people in the world who lead fairy tale lives.
Perfect by every measure. As seen on carefully choreographed TV screens in the build up to the film.
They define your taste in dresses. How you cut your hair.
How you might even cultivate an accent.
How you get married. And how you live.
If the theaters don't come back after Covid, that's what we'll miss.
The intimacy of the unreal.
You've joined the trillion photo club
The selfies, the pouts and the duckfaces. They all add up, for sure
We use smartphones to click as many as 1.4 trillion photographs every year.
And the next trillion is not too far away.
For most of us, the routine is simple.
Click, take a look at the result and delete, or upload to social media and move on.
We rarely look back.
The photos on our smartphones disappear into phone storage, into the cloud and into oblivion.
When did you last look at all the photos you have taken over the years?
When the family gets together at a marriage, may be?
You scroll through the timeline, stopping for a few moments to re-live a memory.
It's a generation removed from unwieldy albums stored in dusty attics and brought down every few years to oohs and aahs. Remember the time...
There are too many memories to remember.
We're great at accumulating, lousy at organizing.
No one renames photos anymore. Too many to do.
So, they stay auto numbered and auto stored by impersonal algorithms.
Faces lost in the mist of time.
We've forgotten why we took the photographs.
As they dissolve into abundant anonymity.
So, how many photos did you take today?
The photo trajectory
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