I am very much looking forward to seeing the movie next week – the Toy World team has its best Barbiecore outfits ready and is raring to go. Hat tip to the marketing teams of both companies, who really have delivered fantastic activations and achieved amazing results. Thankfully, there have been some positive stories to balance up the crazy stuff, none more so than the incredible promotional campaign that Mattel and Warner Bros have initiated ahead of the launch of the Barbie movie. One might suggest that if Amazon was entirely confident that its current procedures were suitably robust and effective, it would have nothing to worry about. Of course, there is a serious underlying issue here – the VLOP status would confer additional responsibilities on Amazon to protect its users from illegal products. What on earth are they going to claim to be? Very large? Online? Platform? Nothing is jumping out as being wildly inaccurate there. I am very much looking forward to hearing which part of the definition Amazon refutes. In fact, Amazon is taking legal action to have the designation removed. Apparently, Amazon has disputed its categorization by the EU as a Very Large Online Platform. And coming just after the announcement of the closure of 100 standalone Argos branches, which will leave 70 towns without a physical Argos store, I wonder slightly about the optics.īut if I have some reservations about the efficacy of this particular promotion, they pale into insignificance next to my bemusement at Amazon’s remarkable attempt to win the ‘Shaggy – It wasn’t me’ award for 2023 (and possibly the whole decade). I suppose you could say that it’s an act of selfless generosity, but I can’t help thinking that a big giveaway of this nature risks positioning toys as products of low intrinsic worth. I’m sure the fact that the competition coincided with Amazon Prime Days was purely coincidental and had no bearing on the timing of the promotion. Positioned as a way of tackling the amount of time kids spend on their phones and as an attempt to get “children playing again” (really, children aren’t playing?), customers could enter a competition to win a £20 voucher to redeem against a toy for their kids (or presumably themselves). Let’s start with Argos and its giveaway of £20,000 worth of toys. As it’s summer, we have definitely hit silly season and some companies seem to be embracing that concept rather enthusiastically. Hence I find myself writing this week’s Blog overlooking the beach, trying to make sense of some of the more bizarre stories that have been doing the rounds this week. I have been in Italy visiting Clementoni this week, as the company celebrates its 60th anniversary.
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