Breaking Through Amazon’s Hype Machine
5 things about the retail giant we should be paying attention to
In a marginally better anticlimax than most M. Night Shyamalan plot twists, reports indicate that Amazon has decided to split its HQ2 between Long Island City, New York, and Arlington, Virginia. Mercifully, Amazon’s grand quest to use the starry-eyed idealism of mid-market politicians as a tax-evasion bargaining chip against NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is finally over. New York is getting 25,000 more sweaty bodies on the rush hour 7 train while Arlington will have lunchtime lines at Sweetgreen that stretch into the Pentagon parking lot.
Overall, the HQ2 hoopla was a brilliantly executed PR stunt that was created to keep Amazon constantly at the top of American consumers’ minds in a narrative that it squarely controls. HQ2 provided Amazon with millions of dollars of free earned media and a cover for everything from its warehouse workers peeing in bottles to a precipitously quiet 20 percent decline in its stock price. Along the way, it taught us a lot about the paradox of effectively reporting on and talking about Amazon.
As the world’s largest online retailer, the current No. 3 media company in the U.S., a dominant force in cloud computing, and the single-largest corporate influence on the U.S…
