I’ve been neglecting my “duty” of late, late for an appointment I perhaps made without meaning to. I’ve had plenty of things I want to write about, but lacked the discipline to actually do so. A short one in the hopes that greases the wheel.
Amazon is upping its advertising given its increasing array of products – par for the course. A new commercial has entered the mix for the Echo. The Echo and Alexa are, for now, attached at the hip, and ne’er more shall we see ads for the (rather undifferentiated) speaker without its smart component, Alexa. As an aside, a friend told me there is a whole team in Seattle devoted to giving ‘her’ a personality. Seldom have I been so desperate to see the personality tests of a group of people as those on the personality team.
The ad begins with an unsubtle progressive inversion of a mother leaving her house, her child in the arms of its father (presumably, we might be so progressive that this is simply an enlightened man unrelated to the child) who looks enthusiastic but on edge. The father fixes his gaze on his child and speaks. The experts tell us that speech is incredibly important to a child’s mental development, particularly under the age of five. Blessed are the parents who engage with their infants, rather than haul them around the streets with their own faces buried in smartphones. And so, our enlightened chap looks fondly at the babe and speaks…to Alexa.
If memory serves, the man in fact does not speak to the child at all during the commercial, only to Alexa. But more so, Alexa speaks to him. To be fair, this is light material. Rather than leaving a written instruction held to the fridge by a magnet (so 80s!) having Alexa speak about the baby’s teething tool at some pre-determined point in time is mundane, albeit more patronizing than pen and paper. (And if the grizzled hero had asked Alexa, would she know? If the house was rigged up like an Amazon Go store – undoubtedly on a whiteboard somewhere – she doubtless would.) By the time we reach the end, however, we’ve crossed quite a bit of territory. We started with the man asking Alexa to turn up the music, something pompous Mercedes drivers have been asking their cars to do since the turn of the century. When father and child return from a playdate, caught in the rain, Alexa reminds the man that his wife/girlfriend/roommate loves him. Alexa is an emotional surrogate. He smiles. Without his smart speaker, the underpinnings of their relationship would doubtless have melted in that rain like a chalk heart on the sidewalk. Alexa saves the day, but really it’s you (you’re empowered!) acting through your trusted friend and smart speaker, the Echo.
This is, of course, absurd. The staging is careful if unsubtle: the boosted music transitioning from diagetic to non-diagetic to demonstrate Alexa’s underlying influence throughout; Alexa reminding the father he is loved at just the moment his spirits are flagging after a day of child care; Alexa has even filled in the role of the fourth member of the nuclear family, helping to raise her younger sibling by telling papa the location of the teething toy!
It’s only fair we assume the teething toy was bought from Amazon. This is downstream value – not only do they make money on the mediocre speaker, they get all the items and services you access through it. In all seriousness, I imagine Amazon’s selection of teething items is unbelievable, and that the prices are highly competitive – with free shipping, probably unbeatable for all but the most refined toddler gums. The retail side of Amazon simply returns us to their home base of an incredible fulfillment machine spun up to light speed on the miraculous negative operating cycle.
But what about the other side of the interactions here? Does Amazon use everything or anything it hears? To do what, to target ads for this family? To build new services, essentially gaining free information it might otherwise have had to test the market for, information which you might not – on full consideration – have parted with so easily? Ignoring the fact that Alexa’s buffer stores information and seems to frequently activate unintentionally, almost certainly. When mom sets the reminder about the toy in the freezer, does Amazon take note of that specific request? What about the reminder of feelings? Will our lucky twosome see sponsored ads for baby-related products or romantic gifts on Amazon? Could that information pass to third parties, who could mail me (electronically or physically) ads of their own? Keep in mind Amazon, like most large companies, updated their terms of service only a few months agree to comply with the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation. Presumably they favor the customer more than they have done in recent years. We read:
Amazon processes and retains your Alexa Interactions, such as your voice inputs, music playlists, and your Alexa to-do and shopping lists, in the cloud to provide, personalize, and improve our services.
So yes. Mom’s recording is analyzed by Amazon to ‘personalize’ her shopping experience. Keep in mind a majority of Americans dislike targeted advertising. Speaking of which:
On both Amazon-owned and operated sites and unaffiliated sites, Amazon displays interest-based advertising using information you make available to us when you interact with our sites, content, or services. Interest-based ads, also sometimes referred to as personalized or targeted ads, are displayed to you based on information from activities such as purchasing on our sites, visiting sites that contain Amazon content or ads, interacting with Amazon tools, or using our payment services.
Why hello! Amazon is not Google or Facebook, surveillance capitalism isn’t their primary game…but they step into it quite nicely:
We do not provide any personal information to advertisers or to third party sites that display our interest-based ads. However, advertisers and other third-parties (including the ad networks, ad-serving companies, and other service providers they may use) may assume that users who interact with or click on a personalized ad or content are part of the group that the ad or content is directed towards (for example, users in the Pacific Northwest who bought or browsed for classical music). Also, some third-parties may provide us information about you (such as the sites where you have been shown ads or demographic information) from offline and online sources that we may use to provide you more relevant and useful advertising.
No doubt mother and father will appreciate the exposure to the teething toy ads and anniversary rings from Amazon jewelry, safe in the knowledge they are known only as new parents in the need of tools of the parenting trade and a good date who live in the metro Seattle area (the rain clued me in).
In any case, I thought the commercial was creepy in that it tied us back into the big issues we already know about large technology companies, but the strange intermediation or intercession of Alexa as a communication device between people bothers me. It’s a small step, I admit. Voice control already lets us dictate messages on our phones to email or text to people, so what’s the difference if Alexa is relaying these messages for us at a specific time? Maybe none. But at some point, I think we should be okay with leaving the volume down and talking to the baby, or maybe picking up the phone and telling someone we love them ourselves.
smq.world 