New Parents Complain Amazon Baby-Registry Ads Are Deceptive (wsj.com)

Unwanted gifts arrive after friends click on promotions tucked into wish lists. From a report: Kima Nieves recently received two Aveeno bath-time sets and a box of Huggies diapers through her baby registry on Amazon. The only problem? The new mother didn't ask for the products, or even want them. Instead, Johnson & Johnson and Kimberly-Clark each paid Amazon.com hefty sums to place those sponsored products onto Ms. Nieves's and other consumers' baby registries. The ads look identical to the rest of the listed products in the registry, except for a small gray "Sponsored" tag. Unsuspecting friends and family clicked on the ads and purchased the items, assuming Ms. Nieves had chosen them. "Very sneaky," said the 28-year-old health-care analyst from Fredericksburg, Va. "That's friends' and family's money going somewhere we didn't approve of."

Amazon in recent years has charged into advertising, building the third-largest digital ad business in the U.S. after Alphabet's Google and Facebook, according to eMarketer. Its ad revenue is on pace to double this year, to $5.8 billion, eMarketer estimates. As Amazon has monetized more space on its website, shoppers are increasingly encountering sponsored ads. Amazon is "starting to see how far they can push things," said Harry Brignull, a U.K.-based consultant who specializes in spotting web-design tactics that get people to click on something. Amazon's sponsored ads have appeared in its baby registries for more than a year. Responding to a Wall Street Journal inquiry about the ads, an Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment on criticism that the ads are deceptive, but said the retailer is now phasing out the sponsored listings. "We're constantly experimenting with new ways to improve the shopping experiences for customers," she said.

Comments

bad marketing

[Moblaster]

if they were smarter they'd make them add-on bundle products, clearly marketed as such (perhaps w a special discount, as this would encourage gifters to add-on the products and get the new parents hooked on them)

mainlining the sponsored products among parent-selected ones is very shortsighted and likely to lead to anger, because a registry should be a "trusted" information source

It gets worse.

[Gravis Zero]

Kima Nieves recently received two Aveeno bath-time sets and a box of Huggies diapers through her baby registry on Amazon. The only problem? The new mother didn't ask for the products, or even want them.

Not only that, she didn't make a baby registry on amazon, never even had a baby and wasn't even a woman! ;)

If it's a gift

[bobstreo]

Return the unwanted items and buy what you actually wanted.

Not indicating paid advertisements as such is unacceptable.

Re:If it's a gift

[Nidi62]

Not indicating paid advertisements as such is unacceptable.

They indicate sponsored ads, but do so by using a small, grey banner (not much darker than the background white) right below the product name. It's underhanded, but in terms of internet sponsored ads/content sadly par for the course. The issue is inserting them into what are essentially private lists. That's where the line has been crossed. If they want to have at the bottom of the list a clearly demarcated section of "related" or "suggested" products, fine, but paid listings should not be interspersed through the list.

Re:If it's a gift

[squiggleslash]

Well, people complained about flashy, jumping and moving ads and this is the result.

No, it isn't. The "ads" have been moved from where they should be to look like regular content. That's deceptive, not pandering to user requests.

Re:Buy your own stuff

[Megol]

Yeah, they have been here since at least Windows 3.1!

That's the worst part

[SuperKendall]

To me the worst part of the whole thing is not that the person received something they did not want - it's that someone meaning to buy them something they did want was tricked into buying something they did not. :-(

It's a way to turn a nice gesture into a crappy experience. So even if you can return something it taints the whole reason to have a registry, at a time when you have no free time to worry about things like returns.

It's deceptive. How to highlight it?

[almitydave]

If you RTFA, you'll see the screenshot which shows that the ad looks identical to the baby registry items, except for the grey "sponsored" text, including the "0/1 Purchased" bit which can only be meant to deceive, since it indicates someone has requested some number of this item.

Anyway, I've been bugged by this practice for a while. When you're scrolling through the results, you can't quickly pick out the ads from the real results without reading each item. If you have the Stylish browser extension, you can add the following rules to better highlight which items are ads. I just change colors to make them obvious, but I you could make them invisible if you wish:

.s-sponsored-header {
        color: #f00 !important;
        font-weight: bold !important;
} .AdHolder {
        color: #ddd;
        background-color: #ffa;
}