Amazon exposed for discrimination! Algorithmic push leads to controversy

Amazon A9 algorithm has always been one of the technologies that Amazon is proud of, and is the basic rule for the search display of the entire Amazon platform. Recently, this push mechanism of Amazon has been exposed by relevant organizations for serious discrimination issues! Amazon is required to rectify the algorithm and display format.

In the disclosed case, the relevant agency discovered that Amazon's push algorithm would only push some "household cleaning supplies" products to female consumers. When the agency's testers switched their accounts to male, they would not receive push notifications for these products.

Amazon has declined to comment on the issue of push discrimination, but discrimination of all kinds is a serious problem in the United States, and companies will not be in a good situation if they are caught, whether based on gender or race. Amazon must be discussing countermeasures internally.

From a consumer's perspective, Amazon's product ads are only pushed to certain individuals, which does have some discriminatory implications. However, as a seller who places ads, there is nothing wrong with Amazon choosing to place products to people who have a greater chance of buying. It can even be said that it is a very responsible behavior for sellers who place ads.

Take this exposed case as an example. Sellers who sell cleaning products are very happy that their ads are only delivered to women. If Amazon backend is not unable to set up such a filtering function, many sellers would like to personally filter the target groups.

When we place advertisements, we attach great importance to the effectiveness of the advertisements. If there is a problem with the target group (for example, women's clothing is placed to male users), a large amount of useless exposure will be generated, which will seriously affect the performance of the advertising group.

Although the exposure of discrimination issues is not favorable to Amazon, it means that Amazon advertisements will indeed be pushed to the most accurate customer groups possible , and this is also evidence that Amazon collects and classifies buyer information, which is actually good news for sellers who place advertisements .

Prime Day has just passed, and the extremely high advertising bidding wars during the promotion have gradually begun to calm down. Now is a window period for adjusting advertising strategies.

Amazon's entire advertising system has actually undergone quite a lot of changes since last year. Many sellers have not yet fully understood new features such as product matching, dynamic bidding, and display ads. Some sellers who have not used in-site advertising before also don't know how to choose between automatic and manual advertising when entering and exiting advertising functions. Today, taking advantage of the good news about the advertising algorithm, I will briefly talk to you about how to choose an advertising format based on your stage.

Simply put, manual advertising means choosing keywords or competing products yourself. Amazon will fetch your products based on the words/products you target and push them to the search page when customers search.

Keyword targeting allows for a phased approach that is accurate and controllable, so the upper limit of keyword targeting for manual advertising is very high, and it is one of the advertising forms favored by big sellers.

If you don’t have a good grasp of keywords, you can also choose to manually place ads based on competing products . In this way, Amazon will automatically grab the keywords used by competing products to display your products, which is relatively simpler. (We will hold an offline sharing conference + knowledge contest in Hangzhou next month. Teacher Alice will share part of the content of the core advertising course with everyone at the conference. Sellers who want to participate can scan the code at the end of the article to find me to sign up)

Automatic advertising is the form that requires the least operation. As long as you select the products to be placed and bid, Amazon will grab the information and keywords and place them under the competing products. This method has the least controllability and the input-output ratio is unstable, but automatic placement also has its own gameplay.